SquirrelInHell

• SquirrelInHell 28 Jan 2018 17:35 UTC

  89 points

  on: A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy

  It is a little bit unfair to say that buying 10 bicoins was everything you needed to do. I owned 10 bitcoins, and then sold them at a meager price. Nothing changed as a result of me merely understanding that buying bitcoins was a good idea.

  What you really needed was to sit down and think up a strict selling schedule, and also commit to following it. E.g. spend $100 on bitcoin now, and later sell exactly 10% of your bitcoins every time that 10% becomes worth at least $10,000 (I didn’t run the numbers to check if these exact values make sense, but you get the idea).

  Upstream of not taking effective action was unwillingness to spend a few hours thinking hard about what would actually be smart to do if the hypothetical proved true.

The AI Align­ment Prob­lem Has Already Been Solved(?) Once

Tune Your Cog­ni­tive Strategies

• SquirrelInHell 16 Feb 2018 14:55 UTC

  25 points

  on: Toward a New Tech­ni­cal Ex­pla­na­tion of Tech­ni­cal Explanation

  [excellent, odds ratio 3:2 for worth checking LW2.0 sometimes and 4:3 for LW2.0 will succeed]

  I think “Determinism and Reconstructability” are great concepts but you picked terrible names for them, and I’ll probably call them “gears” and “meta-gears” or something short like that.

  This article made me realize that my cognition runs on something equivalent to logical inductors, and what I recently wrote on Be Well Tuned about cognitive strategies is a reasonable attempt at explaining how to implement logical inductors in a human brain.

Abuse of Pro­duc­tivity Systems

• SquirrelInHell 9 Apr 2016 1:53 UTC

  24 points

  on: Pos­i­tivity Thread :)

  I love you too! ❤ ❤ ❤

  I mean, it’s fun and all, but what do you think about:

  • spreading niceness to all discussion on LW, not just a special separate thread,

  • having an actual topic to discuss while being nice about it?

  Edit: ah, right, you wanted to not go meta here. Sorry.

  #LessWrongMoreNice

  What links here?

  • Viliam's comment on Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016 by Elo (9 Apr 2016 8:48 UTC; 9 points)

• SquirrelInHell 19 Nov 2017 14:08 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Hero Licensing

  Additional predition: it was more fun to write this than the book, and the writing involved an initial long contiguous chunk.

  (Where it’s coming from: my enjoyment of reading the above was mostly a little bit of thrill, of the kind I get from watching someone break rules that I always wished I could break. If that makes sense.)

• SquirrelInHell 17 Jun 2016 2:21 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Buy­ing happiness

  On the one hand, I upvoted this because there is no reason for this post to be in the negatives.

  Seconded.

  I don’t see why anyone would downvote a post that does a great job at summarizing conclusions of a paper, even if they don’t agree with the content of said paper.

  I think the community is hurting itself by punishing the effort gjm put into writing this, and he doesn’t even say anywhere that he supports these findings personally.

Su­per­hu­man Meta Process

Geo­met­ric Bayesian Update

Neu­tral­iz­ing Phys­i­cal Annoyances

• SquirrelInHell 21 Jun 2016 8:38 UTC

  17 points

  on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

  I once had a system in which I was writing checkboxes on paper for tasks I wanted to do regularly.

  Stuff like eating vitamins, or doing backups of my server.

  It started with the typical daily/​weekly/​monthly todos, but it gradually evolved into something much less rigid, and calculated in a (increasingly complex) spreadsheet.

  For a long time, I’ve been working out the balance between this system being forgiving...

  (as in, allowing for soft recovery, rather then being hit by “do 12 hours of jogging” after a week of vacation)

  and also giving you accountability over a longer period

  (as in, avoiding the “I’ll skip it this week, and instead definitely do it next week” effect).

  I’ve also recently had the idea to publish some Android apps, and one of the first ideas was to code a cleaner, leaner and meaner version of my old spreadsheet.

  As far as productivity apps go, this is very basic stuff, but I haven’t actually found anything out there that could replace my system.

  So lo and behold.

  It’s still kinda maybe not feature complete, but I already use it myself (and I’ve finally retired the spreadsheet :D):

  If you like this sorta stuff, give it a try and let me know what you’d like to see improved.

Non-Fic­tion Book Reviews

Pre­dic­tion Cal­ibra­tion—Do­ing It Right

• SquirrelInHell 4 Mar 2018 12:21 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: Mur­phy’s Quest Ch 1: Ex­po­sure Therapy

  This story is trash and so am I.

  If people don’t want to see this on LW I can delete it.

  You are showcasing a certain unproductive mental pattern, for which there’s a simple cure. Repeat after me:

  This is my mud pile

  I show it with a smile

  And this is my face

  It also has its place

  For increased effect, repeat 5 times in rap style.

Hap­piness Is a Chore

• SquirrelInHell 26 Feb 2018 14:06 UTC

  13 points

  0

  on: Focusing

  tl;dr: your brain hallucinates sensory experiences that have no correspondence to reality. Noticing and articulating these “felt senses” gives you access to the deep wisdom of your soul.

  I think this snark makes it clear that you lack gears in your model of how focusing works. There are actual muscles in your actual body that get tense as a result of stuff going on with your nervous system, and many people can feel that even if they don’t know exactly what they are feeling.

• SquirrelInHell 20 Jan 2018 14:49 UTC

  13 points

  on: Kenshō

  Not to put too fine a point on it: through the tone and content of the post, I can still see the old attachments and subconscious messed-up strategies shining through.

  I am, of course, not free of blame here because the same could be said about my comment.

  However, I reach out over both of these and touch you, Val.

• SquirrelInHell 8 Feb 2018 17:39 UTC

  12 points

  on: Men­tal TAPs

  Request: Has this idea already been explicitely stated elsewhere? Anything else regular old TAPs are missing?

  It’s certainly not very new, but nothing wrong with telling people about your TAP modifications. There are many nuances to using TAPs in practice, and ultimately everyone figures out their own style anyway. Whether you have noticed or not, you probably already have this meta-TAP:

  “TAPs not working as I imagined → think how to improve TAPs”

  It is, ultimately, the only TAP you need to successfully install to start the process of recursive improvement.

• SquirrelInHell 7 Feb 2018 20:14 UTC

  12 points

  on: Ham­mer­time Day 10: Murphyjitsu

  I have the suspicion that everyone is secretly a master at Inner Sim

  There’s a crucial difference here between:

  • good “secretly”: I’m so good at it it’s my second nature, and there’s little reason to bring it up anymore

  • bad “secretly”: I’m not noticing what I’m doing, so I can’t optimize it, and never have