Spiracular

Karma: 850

Spiracular 14 Apr 2021 22:28 UTC
5 points
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: niplav’s Shortform
It’s sorta non-obvious. I kinda poked at this for hours, at some point? It took a while for me to settle on a model I liked for this.

Here’s the full notes for what I came up with.

Physics: Feels close. Hm… biological life as a self-compiler on a physics substrate?

DNA or gametes seem really close to a “quine” for this: plug it into the right part of an active compiler, and it outputs many instances of its own code + a customized compiler. Although it crashes/gets rejected if the compiler is too different (ex: plant & animal have different regulatory markers & different sugar-related protein modifications).

I don’t have a fixed word for the “custom compiler” thing yet (“optimized compiler”? “coopted compiler”? “spawner”? “Q-spawner”?). I have seen analogous stuff in other places, and I’m tempted to call it a somewhat common pattern, though. (ex: vertically-transmitted CS compiler corruption, or viruses producing tumor micro-environments that are more favorable to replicating the virus)

Spiracular 14 Apr 2021 22:13 UTC
5 points
on: Spiracular’s Shortform Feed
Live Parsers and Quines

An unusual mathematical-leaning definition of a living thing.

(Or, to be more precise… a potential living immortal? A replicon? Whatever.)

A self-replicating physical entity with...

3 Core Components:
- Quine: Contains the code to produce itself
- Parser: A parser for that code
  - Code includes instructions for the parser; ideally, compressed instructions
- Power: Actively running (probably on some substrate)
  - Not actively running is death, although for some the death is temporary.
  - Access to resources may be a subcomponent of this?
Additional components:
- Substrate: A material that can be converted into more self
  - Possibly a multi-step process
  - Access to resources is probably a component of this
- Translator: Converts quine into power, or vice-versa
  - Not always necessary; sometimes a quine is held as power, not substrate
Parser and Code: the information can actually be stored on either; you can extract the correct complex signal from complete randomness using an arbitrarily-complex parser chosen for that purpose. There are analogies that can be drawn in the other direction, too: a fairly dumb parser can make fairly complicated things, given enough instructions. (Something something Turing Machines)

Ideally, though, they’re well-paired and the compression method is something sensible, to reduce complexity.

A quine by itself has only a partial life; it is just its own code, it requires a parser to replicate.

(If you allow for arbitrarily complex parsers, any code could be a quine, if you were willing to search for the right parser.)

Compilers are… parsers? (Or translators?)

It is possible for what was “code” information to be embedded into the parser. I think this is part of what happens when you completely integrate parts in IFS.

Examples

Example replicons: A bacterium, a cell, a clonal organism, a pair of opposite-sexed humans (but not a single), self-contained repeating Game of Life automata, the eventual goal of RepRap (a 3D printer fully producing a copy of itself)

Viruses: Sometimes quines, sometimes pre-quine and translator

The distinctive thing about Lisp is that its core is a language defined by writing an interpreter in itself. It wasn’t originally intended as a programming language in the ordinary sense. It was meant to be a formal model of computation, an alternative to the Turing machine. If you want to write an interpreter for a language in itself, what’s the minimum set of predefined operators you need? The Lisp that John McCarthy invented, or more accurately discovered, is an answer to that question.

-- What I Worked On, Paul Graham

Related: Self-Reference, Post-Irony, Hofstadter’s Strange Loop, Turing Machine, Automata (less-so), deconstruction (less-so)

Is Tiddlywiki a quine?

Is a cryonics’d human a quine? (wrt future technology)

The definition of parasite used in Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasites is literally quines.

(Complex multi-step life-cycle in the T5 case, though?. The quine produced a bare-bones quine-compiling “spawner” when it interacts with the wild-type, and then replicates on that. Almost analogous to CS viruses that infect the compiler, and any future compiler compiled by that compiler.)

Process is Art: Is art that demonstrates how to craft the art, a quine on a human compiler?

Some connection to: Compartmentalization (Black Box Testing, unit tests, separation of software components) and the “swappability” of keeping things general and non-embedded, with clearly-marked and limited interface-surfaces (APIs). Generates pressure against having “arbitrary compilers” in practice.
What links here?
- Spiracular's comment on niplav’s Shortform by niplav (14 Apr 2021 22:28 UTC; 5 points)

Spiracular 11 Apr 2021 21:40 UTC
4 points
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: niplav’s Shortform
DNA is a quine, when processed by DNA Replicase.

Although with a sufficiently complex (or specific) compiler or processor, any arbitrary stream of information can be made into a quine.

You can embed information in either of instructions/substrate, or compiler/processor. Quines usually seem limited to describing instructions/substrate, but that’s not the only place information can be drawn from. I’ve kinda come to think of it as 2-term operation (ex: “this bit of quine code is a quine wrt python”).

(More physical quines: Ink scribbles on a sheet of paper are a quine wrt a copy-machine. At about the far-end of “replicative complexity gets stored in the processor,” you have the “activated button” of a button-making machine (which activates with a button, and outputs buttons in an active state). I think the “activated button” here is either a quine, or almost a quine.)

The cool thing about life is that it it is both a quine, and its own processor. (And also, sorta its own power source.)

I find it simpler to call systems like this “living” (at least while active/functional), since they’re meaningfully more than just quines.

Viruses are definitely quines, though. Viruses and plasmids are non-living quines that compile and run on living biological systems.

Spiracular 3 Apr 2021 19:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: How You Can Gain Self Control Without “Self-Control”
One little drawback of ThoughtSaver (although I generally like the idea!)...

The fact that I reclustered these right away, means I had better retention for the leaf-related questions but got annoyed whenever the cluster-branch questions came up. Memorizing how you had phrased it was sometimes in conflict with remembering a more useful clustering, for me.

I don’t know how to build things that are resilient to this, but I wanted at least some awareness of this problem.

Spiracular 3 Apr 2021 19:16 UTC
1 point
on: How You Can Gain Self Control Without “Self-Control”
I immediately reclustered your motivational-breakdown into the following:

OODA Loop
- Noticing distractions/impulses
- Tendency to override distractions/impulses
- High energy
  - High energy ~ High executive function ~ Agility: ability to deliberately direct or change what you’re doing.
  - Separate from staying in flow-state, which basically maps to “momentum.” However, initiating a flow-state deliberately can take some energy/agility.
Desires
- Motivated towards healthy goals
- Unmotivated by unhealthy desires
Pain Attitude
- Pain tolerance
- Pain enjoyment
- Flow state
Time Discounting
- Low discount on future gratification
- High discount on future pain
Same low-level leaves, except that I slightly-rephrased lack of desire for unhealthy things, and I added “pain enjoyment” as separate from “pain tolerance.” (I experience and model them as distinct things; one is buffer that can be overwhelmed, but the other can become a bona-fide addiction in some people.)

...might also mention that I see flow-state as potentially fitting into ANY of these categories.

This re-clustering maps much better to how I personally would calculate/model these.

Spiracular 3 Apr 2021 19:02 UTC
3 points
on: Spiracular’s Shortform Feed
OODAs vs TAPs

TAPs are just abbreviated or stunted OODA loops, and I think I prefer some aspects of the OODA phrasing.

OODA: Observe → Orient → Decide → Act (loop)

TAP: Trigger → Action (Plan/Pattern)

TAPs usually map to “Observe->Act.”

Orient loosely means setting up a Model/Metrics/Framework/Attitude.

(This can take anywhere from ¹⁄₂ a second to years; wildly variable amounts of time depending on how simple and familiar the problem and system is. TAPs implicitly assume this is one of the simple/fast cases.)

One case where OODA’s phrasing is better, is “Attitude TAPs”:

“Attitude TAPs” are one of the most valuable TAP types, but are a non-obvious feature of the TAPs framework unless this is explicitly mentioned.

Ex: (from here)”when I’m finding my daily writing difficult, and I’m thinking about quitting, I’ll notice that and try to figure out what’s going wrong (rather than mindlessly checking Twitter to avoid writing).”

Alternatively, this could be phrased as an abbreviated OODA that cements an “Observe ->Orient” without fixing an action. Personally, I find this a bit cleaner.

Spiracular 21 Mar 2021 23:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
A bit of context: I ended up with an odd connection between the way he described a “Realness-gauging heuristic,” and how Blockchain works, that I wanted to share. This eventually led to the question bubbling up.

Vervaeke mentioned that a problem with some Higher State of Consciousness (HSC) experiences is that some people experience an “Axial Revolution in miniature,” and decide that the real world is the dream, and their experience in the altered state was the reality. (Which they usually feel a need to return to, due to what he dubbed a “Platonic meta-drive” towards realness.)

Usually, with altered states (ex: literal dreaming), one ends up treating the altered state as a dream-like subjective experience, and understand your waking-life as reality. In these cases, this seems to get flipped.

To paraphrase Vervaeke...

Realness is the pattern of intelligibility with the widest, richest scope. It makes the most sense of your experience; your beliefs, your memories, etc.

The way I interpret this is that one of the common heuristics to ascertain “realness” is to search for the most extensive, highest-continuity, or most vividly experienced comprehension algorithm that you’ve ever built.

This calls faintly to mind fork-resolution in blockchains.

For the most part, blockchains branch constantly, but by design turn whatever is the longest and most-developed legal branch into the canonical one*. This is not purely continuous, since this is not always the same chain over time; one can overtake another. As long as it’s the the longest, it becomes the “valid” one.

While this is one of the simplest fork-resolution metics to explain, it is not the only one.

Other varieties of forking (ex: a git repo for a software package) may use other canonicity-resolution heuristics. Here’s a very common one: for a lot of projects, the most-built one is called an “Alpha” while the canonical version numbers are reserved for branches deemed debugged or “sufficiently stable.”

(It is also sometimes possible to provide an avenue for re-integrating or otherwise feeding an off-branch to a main one (ex: uncles), but this can get complicated rather quickly.)

* With the notable exception of hard-forks: a rare event, where there is a social move to quash the validity of a chain in which a substantial misuse has occurred. Coming up with similar cases in history or social reality is left as an exercise for the reader.

Spiracular 21 Mar 2021 23:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
A question:

What are some of the metrics people use, to judge whether something felt “real?” What are some metrics used to resolve fork-conflicts, between different ways of making sense of the world?

What does it mean, when these are different, and how do you resolve that conflict?

(A few example conflicts: A dream that is obviously not self-consistent, but still makes useful predictions. A vivid memory you have, that none of your friends can recall. A high-confidence intuitive prediction you could make whose certainty colors your perception, but which others insist is based on invalid starting premises.)

Spiracular 18 Mar 2021 23:51 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.

But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)

P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?

* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**

** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”

Spiracular 16 Mar 2021 18:16 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.

(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)

This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.

Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.

* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**

** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.

Spiracular 13 Mar 2021 8:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Assyrian Armies of the Axial-Age: Alphabetical, Arithmetic, and Affluent.

Spiracular 13 Mar 2021 7:31 UTC
9 points
in reply to: weft’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Here’s a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too?

He overuses the term “unifying.” He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he’d cut it out.

I usually see “unifying” as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces “special casing.”

He almost never means that. It’s always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises.

In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive “Summary Here Headers” (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn’t a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that’s thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object.

I think his “big theory” is actually something more like… spoilers… which I wouldn’t have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes.

(I can’t get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.)

Maybe “attention as a terrain,” or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later’s actually a pretty decent line of thought.

Spiracular 8 Mar 2021 21:39 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
I appreciated the Foolishness vs Ignorance distinction he drew up in Episode 1.

“Foolishness is lack of wisdom, Ignorance is lack of knowledge” sounds initially trite. But when he drills a little further into it, it became clear that his use of “Foolishness” is trying to gesture at premature pattern-identification and pattern-fixation, with a failure to notice alternative patterns.

“Premature reification” is what I’ve heard Ozzie call something similar, and that’s the handle I most often use for it.

There are probably some types of error that a child wouldn’t make, but an adult would, because adults more readily project one of their pre-existing reifications.

...but also, you need a reification to build things or coordinate. They’re not a thing you want to stop doing, they’re a thing you want to learn to monitor, manage, and question sometimes.

It is good to have some tools to dislodge or rewrite reifications which don’t actually apply. (And this seems to be what he sees as a selling-point of altered states.)

Spiracular 8 Mar 2021 21:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Lesswrong doesn’t have a “group”-like (user subthread) functionality, and I mostly think Lesswrong is currently not an optimal place to do “subscribe to a sequence of posts” content (...ironically?), since it doesn’t seem presently rigged for this.

(I thought they discontinued sequences functionality? They may have actually limited access to it to a karma score or something, and I’m holding this assumption weakly.)

These are counterbalanced for me by the accessibility/reach of LW (for audience and commenters) and the expected quality of comments, though. And it’s always possible to just provide in-text links to tie together a sequence. I think I’ve convinced myself not to push to change it; it’s a fine choice.

I’m… really curious to see how well “discussion-driven something-or-other” goes. I was a little disappointed with how little engagement the “Questions” section sometimes got, and I usually think of “Link-out w/ discussion” as a slightly-similar datatype.

Spiracular 8 Mar 2021 21:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: [Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
This post seems to be the meta-Lecture Club, not Episode 1, so I’m a tad confused about where to object-comment on Epi 1 (high-level? subthread on Episode 1 summary? Both seem a little suboptimal.)

This probably resolves itself as “just do a highest-level comment” after Epi 1, but I wanted to express the confusion.

Spiracular 11 Jan 2021 19:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: hamnox’s comment on: Bioinfohazards
Edit: Just separating this for coherence’s sake

Lab Safety Procedures/PPE/Sanitation: I think I have some ideas for where I could start on that? BSL is probably a good place to start.

I’d feel pretty weird posting about that on LessWrong, tbh? (I still might, though.)

I don’t currently feel like writing this. But, I’ll keep it in mind as a possibility.

Summary of orgs, positions, room-for-funding: I do not have the means, access, clearance, or credentials to do this. (I don’t care about me lacking some of those credentials, but other people have made it clear that they do.)

I really would like this to exist! I get the sense that better people than me have tried, and were usually were only able to get part-way, but I haven’t tracked it recently. This has led me to assume that this task is more difficult than you’d expect. I have seen a nice copy of a biosecurity-relevant-orgs spreadsheet circulating at one point, though (which I think could get partial-credit).

The closest thing I probably could output are some thoughts on what broad-projects or areas of research seem likely to be valuable and/or underfunded. But I would expect it to be lower-resolution, and less valuable to people.

Spiracular 11 Jan 2021 18:45 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jacobjacob’s comment on: Bioinfohazards
Heh. Damn, did this post end up in the right Everett branch.

Spiracular 8 Jan 2021 23:03 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Spiracular’s comment on: Bioinfohazards
Here’s a simplification of my current assessment heuristic...
- What order-of-magnitude is the audience? (a multiplier)
  - Any relevant audience skews/filters?
  - What are the tails?
- What’s the trade-off for offense vs defense? (+/- direction, & size)
  - Is it + or—overall? How big?
  - Do any points swamp the others in importance?
- What am I not easily factoring in? Are there any gotchas? (checklist + Murphyjutsu)
  - Future Advances
  - Idea Inoculation
  - Second-degree and unintended audiences
  - Murphyjutsu it
- Sanity Check: Other
  - Roughly how much do I actually trust the judgement I reached?
    Should I sleep on it? Withhold it?
  - Anyone I should run things by?

Spiracular 8 Jan 2021 23:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: hamnox’s comment on: Bioinfohazards
Ah! Thanks for the clarification.

I’ve actually had several people say they liked the Concrete Examples section, but that they wish I’d said more that would help them recreate the thought-process.

Unfortunately, these were old thoughts for me. The logic behind a lot of them feels… “self-evident” or “obvious” to me, or something? Which makes me a worse teacher, because I’m a little blind to what it is about them that isn’t landing.

I’d need to understand what people were seeing or missing, to be able to offer helpful guidance around it. And… nobody commented.

(My rant on basic knowledge was a partial-attempt on my part, to crack open my logic for one of these.)

Edit: I added my core heuristic to the Concrete Examples thread

Spiracular 30 Dec 2020 7:58 UTC
1 point
on: Perceptual Control Theory
Friston’s Free Energy doesn’t have its own page. But I think a lot of the PCT-relevant conversation on LW, ends up under that term. Unlike the “mostly just intro-posts” under the PCT term proper, FFE seems to have more-recent engagement, so I think FFE has more of a presence here than PCT.

In retrospect, not including those was a mistake.

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) handful of the FFE posts:

Spiracular

Live Parsers and Quines

3 Core Components:

Additional components:

Examples

OODA Loop

Desires

Pain Attitude

Time Discounting

OODAs vs TAPs