T431

Karma: 216

T431 2 Dec 2025 23:48 UTC
5 points
0
on: rodeo_flagellum’s Shortform
I am a someone who has participated informally in self-experimentation and in quantified-self activities.

Reading work composed by Gwern (e.g. this piece) and niplav’s (e.g. this piece), alongside writing in the fields of medicine (e.g. this paper) and psychology (e.g. this paper), has been both illuminating and motivating.

I am trying to formalize my data-recording for SE/QS and have found that the following approaches have not “stuck”:
- (1) automated emails or Google Forms
- (2) cron-tabs on my MacBook for digital EOD entry of data
- (3) alarms at EOD for manual entry of data into .csv, .txt, or .json files
One approach that has given me optimism and feels relatively more entertaining (i.e. that seems to “stick” better) has been the following: once per week or month I generate a $L a T e X$ PDF document (using Python to generate the document w/ configuration and command-line arguments) with checkboxes next to categorical variables I want to track (e.g. whether I have consumed at least 2 liters of water; these are loaded from a config.json file) and EOD I fill in the boxes with a pencil for what I did. The goal is to eventually be able to scan the PDF sheets and automatically extract the data for analysis.

Here is a section of an example sheet: here. Here are some of the variables: □ Reading for at least an hour and a half. □ Studying Anki cards at least once. □ Bathing at least once. □ Making at least one comment on an on-line forum. □ Consuming at least a coffee’s worth of caffeine. □ Going to bed before 1:00 AM EST. □ Drinking at least 2 liters of water. □ Meditating for at least 15 minute

T431 30 Nov 2025 6:26 UTC
2 points
0
on: Flashcards are worth it

I’m curious whether it’s possible to turn a resource, like a math textbook, into flashcards in such a way that you memorize the flashcards themselves, enabling a purely mental flashcard review.

Somewhat related to this: to have Anki flashcards or some higher-level flashcard representation (which could yield an Anki deck, e.g. using a genanki workflow) , more consistently extracted from textbooks and made available would make me very happy; I’ve wished for a reality in which, on data or code sharing platforms (e.g. Zenodo or GitHub), the majority of textbook authors or researchers shared their .tex files (for others to use, possibly with Anki) or any Anki cards associated with their work.

T431 19 Nov 2025 17:59 UTC
3 points
0
on: Better Writing Through Claude
Thank you for sharing some thoughts. Somes comments:
- [Question] Do you ever find yourself slipping into a state (possible gradually) of over-reliance on the LLM? This could instantiate itself as a momentary mental-rupture of the routine, where you find yourself pausing and realizing that now it feels more difficult to do something yourself that was, at a time in the recent past, moderately ordinary?
- [Question] As Claude and other LLM become (expectedly) more capable, do you have any preliminary thoughts for how this workflow style may be updated?
- [Remark] I find myself most entertained and invigorated by having Claude generate lists of posts on a particular subject that could be written, along with short descriptions of what these posts might contain. I’ve used the LW API to get LessWrong posts before asking of Claude something akin to “What is missing from this selection?”.

T431 11 Nov 2025 19:41 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: Question the Requirements
I done similarly with my CLAUDE.md, including a line close to what you’ve written but also the line “Please search for and consider other solutions beyond those I’ve suggested before writing any code.” It seems likely to me that there are better ways to communicate this notion to Claude, though, and I’ve done less experimentation than I would like.

T431 23 Jan 2025 18:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dave92F1’s comment on: Patenting Across AI Futures
Thank you for the clarifying response, which might aid in a successful rephrasing of the Question I’ve asked above. This line is particularly helpful:

These risks become worse as patents become easier to obtain (relaxed definitions of novelty, usefulness, and obviousness).

Perhaps I will move this back to draft mode and reconsider.

T431 17 Jan 2025 4:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Rough Sketch for Product to Enhance Citizen Participation in Politics
Upvoted on the basis of clarity, useful / mentoring tone, and the value of the suggestions. Thank you for coming back to this.

In a first-pass read, there is not much I would add, save for mentioning that I’d expect (1)-(4) to change from what they are now were they to actually be implemented in some capacity, given the complexities (jurisdictional resources, public desire, participation, etc…).

I have the Myth of The Rational Voter on my shelf unread!

If I have any sufficiently useful or interesting ideas or comments regarding your remarks, I will add them here.

T431 7 Jan 2025 22:31 UTC
2 points
2
on: Disagreement on AGI Suggests It’s Near
Agree. This post captures the fact that, time and again, historical and once perceived as insurmountable benchmarks in AI have been surpassed. Those not fully cognizant of the situation have been iteratively surprised. People, for reasons I cannot fully work out, will continue to engage in motivated reasoning against current and near-term-future-expected AI capabilities and or economical value, with some part of the evidence-downplaying consisting of shifting AGI-definitional or capability-threshold-to-impress goalposts (see moving goalposts). On a related note, your post also makes me imagine the apologue of the boiling frog of late w.r.t. scaling curves.

T431 4 Jan 2025 19:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: What are some good pieces on civilizational decay / civilizational collapse / weakening of societal fabric?
Although this is an old question, I want to provide an answer, since this is a topic that I am interested in and believe matters for GCR and X-Risk reduction, though it seems quite plausible that this field will radically transform under different level of AI capabilities.

First, if the author of this post has updated their believes about the field of decline and collapse or has formulated a resource list of their own, I would appreciate these being remarked, so I may engage with them.

Of note, I have not fully read some of these books and other resources, but I have minimally skimmed all of them. There are resources I am not including, since these I feel are not worth their time in opportunity costs.

The following are not put in priority order, but I have provided simple ratings of one to three ✯ indicating how much I believe the books are valuable to thinking about collapse. Ratings come after titles so as not to prime the reader.

Books:
- How Worlds Collapse ✯✯✯
- The Collapse Of Complex Societies ✯✯✯
- Secular Cycles ✯✯
- Modernity And Cultural Decline ✯
- Historical Dynamics ✯✯✯
- Social and Cultural Dynamics ✯
- Understanding Collapse ✯✯
- The Evolution of Civilizations ✯
- After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations ✯
- Prophets Of Doom ✯✯ ^[1]
- The Idea Of Decline In Western History ✯
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ✯✯
Web-Links:
- The Seshat Dataset (here and here) ^[2]
- Google Scholar citations for Historical Dynamics
- Google Scholar citations for The Collapse Of Complex Societies
- The Seshat Database on GitHub
- Peter Turchin’s Website
Some further considerations

Anna’s previous comment used the term “proto-model” and alluded to the greater dearth of formalization in this field. It is worth adding here that “this field” (which, at times, I have referred to as “cliodynamics”, “studies in complex societies”, “historical dynamics”, “studies in collapse”, “civilizational dynamics”), is a collection of different academic disciplines, each of which has different levels of quantitative rigor.

Many who have entertained theorizing about human societies and their rise and fall (even the notions of “rise” and “fall” are somewhat dubious) have seldom incorporated quantitative measures or models, though I have still found their work valuable.

The authors in the anthology How Worlds Collapse seem not to interact and or collaborate much with those who study global catastrophic risk (e.g., those who would cite books such as X-Risk or Global Catastrophic Risks), which seems to be a loss for both fields, since those studying GCR and or X-Risks have adopted, more readily (or seemingly so), models and mathematics, with a good canonical paper for the latter entry being Classifying Global Catastrophic Risks (2018), and those in the field of collapse typically are more ready to consider patterns across historical complex societies and psychological dynamics relevant to recovery of complex societies under forces of calamity.

Anyway, best of wishes in your studies of human societies and their dynamics, including their decline.
1. ↩︎
  This covers Toynbee, Spengler, Gobineau, and other historical figures in the field of “collapse” or “complex societies”, including Peter Turchin.
2. ↩︎
  From their sites: Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 to bring together the most current and comprehensive body of knowledge about human history in one place. The huge potential of this knowledge for testing theories about political and economic development has been largely untapped. Our unique Databank systematically collects what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time. This massive collection of historical information allows us and others to rigorously test different hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies across the globe and human history.

T431 4 Jan 2025 18:11 UTC
10 points
0
on: Preference Inversion
I expect to post additional comments on this thread, but for now, w.r.t.

Sometimes the preferences people report or even try to demonstrate are better modeled as a political strategy and response to coercion, than as an honest report of intrinsic preferences.

has the author of this post read Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Kuran, 1997)? I’ve read but have not yet written a review of the book, so I cannot comment too critically on its value in this present conversation, but I believe the author should minimally check it out or skim its table of contents. To pull a better overview (from GoodReads) than I can provide off hand:

Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system.

T431 4 Jan 2025 4:35 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: rodeo_flagellum’s Shortform
Thank you for the typo-linting.

To provide a better response to your first question than the one I’ve provided below, I would need to ask him to explain more than he has already.

From what he has remarked, the first several meetings were very stressful (for most people, this would, of course, be the case!) but soon he adjusted and developed a routine for his meetings.

While the routine could go off course based on the responsiveness of the individual(s) present (one staffer kept nodding Yes, had no questions, and then 20 minutes later remarked that they “take into account” what had been said; another staffer remarked that the US simply needed to innovate AI as much as possible, and that safety that stifled this was not to be prioritized; these are statements paraphrased from my friend), I get the sense that in most instances he has been able to provide adequate context on his organization and the broader situation with AI first (not sure which of these two comes first and for how long they are discussed).

Concerning provision of a description of the AI context, I am not sure how dynamic they are; I think he mentioned querying the staffers on their familiarity, and the impression he had was that most staffers listened well and thought critically about his remarks.

After the aforementioned descriptions, my friend begins discussing measures that can be taken in support of AI Safety.

He mentioned that he tries to steer framings away from those invoking thoughts of arms races or weaponization and instead focuses on uncontrollability “race to the bottom” scenarios, since the former categorization(s) given by others to the staffers has, in his experience, in some instances downplayed concerns for catastrophe and increased focus on further expanding AI capabilities to “outcompete China”.

My friend’s strategy framings seem appropriate and he is a good orator, but I have not the nuanced suggestion that I wanted for my conversation with him, as I’ve not thought enough about which AI risk framings and safety proposals to have ready for staffers and as I believe talking to staffers qualifies as an instance of the proverb “an ounce of practice outweighs a pound of precept”.

T431 4 Jan 2025 3:35 UTC
11 points
0
on: rodeo_flagellum’s Shortform
Constraining and/or lowering (via bans, information concealment, raised expenses, etc…) capabilities gains via regulation of certain AI research and production components (weights, chips, electricity, code, etc…) is a strategy pursued in part or fully by different AI Safety organizations.

One friend (who works in this space) and I were very recently reflecting on AI progress, along with strategies to contend with AI related catastrophes. While we disagree on the success probabilities of different AI Safety plans and their facets, including those pertaining to policy and governance, we broadly support similar measures. He does, however, believe “shut down” strategies ought to be prioritized much more than I do.

This friend has, in the last year, met with between 10-50 (providing this range for preservation of anonymity) congressional staffers; the stories of these meetings he has could make for both an entertaining and informative short book, and I was grateful for the experiences and the details of how he prepares for conversations and framing AI that he imparted on me.

The density of familiarity with AI risk across the staffers was concentrated on weaponization; most staffers (save for 3) did not have much if any sense of AI catastrophe. This point is interesting, but I found how my friend perceived his role in AI Safety with these meetings more intriguing.

To prelude, both him and I believe that, generally speaking, individual humans and governments (including the US government) require some (the more spontaneous, the more impactful) catastrophe to engender productive responses. Examples of this include near-death experiences (for people) and the 11 September 2001 bombings for the US government.

With this remark made: my friend perceives his role to be one primarily of priming the staffers i.e. “the US government” to respond more effectively to catastrophe (e.g. 100s of thousands to millions but not billions dead) than they otherwise would have been able.

Any immediate actions taken by the staffers towards AI Safety, especially with respect to a full cessation of certain lines of research, access to computational resources, or information availability, my friend finds excellent, but due to the improbability of these occurring, he believes the brunt of his impact comes to fruition if there is an AI catastrophe that humans can recover from.

This updated how I perceive the “slow down” focused crowd in AI Safety from being one focused on literally having many aspects of AI progress stalled partially or fully to one of governmental and institutional response enhancement in fire-alarm moments.

T431 29 Dec 2024 17:15 UTC
5 points
1
on: Shallow review of technical AI safety, 2024
Kudos to the authors for this nice snapshot of the field; also, I find the Editorial useful.

Beyond particular thoughts (which I might get to later) for the entries (with me still understanding that quantity is being optimized for, over quality), one general thought I had was: How can this be made into more of “living document”?.

This helps

If we missed you or got something wrong, please comment, we will edit.

but seems less effective a workflow than it could be. I was thinking more of a GitHub README where individuals can PR in modifications to their entries or add in their missing entries to the compendium. I imagine most in this space have GitHub accounts, and with the git tracking, there could be “progress” (in quotes, since more people working doesn’t necessarily translate to more useful outcomes) visualization tools.

The spreadsheet works well internally but does not seem as visible as would a public repository. Forgive me if there is already a repository and I missed it. There are likely other “solutions” I am missing, but regardless, thank you for the work you’ve contributed to this space.

T431 29 Dec 2024 6:43 UTC
3 points
0
on: What happens next?
The below captures some of my thoughts on the “Jobs hits first” scenario.

There is probably something with the sort of break down I have in mind (though, whatever this may be, I have not encountered it, yet) w.r.t. Jobs hits first but here goes: the landscape of AI induced unemployment seems highly heterogeneous, at least in expectation over the next 5 years. For some jobs, it seems likely that there will be instances of (1) partial automation, which could mean either not all workers are no longer needed (even if their new tasks no longer fully resemble their previous tasks), i.e. repurposing of existing workers, or most workers remain employed but do more labor with help from AI and of (2) prevalent usage of AI across the occupational landscape but without much unemployment, with human work (same roles pre-automation) still being sought after, even if there are higher relative costs associated with the human employment (basically, the situation: human work + AI work > AI work, after considering all costs). Updating based on this more nuanced (but not critically evaluated) situation w.r.t. Jobs hits first, I would not expect the demand for a halt to job automation to be any less but perhaps a protracted struggle over what jobs get automated might be less coordinated if there are swaths of the working population still holding out career-hope, on the basis that they have not had their career fully stripped away, having possibly instead been repurposed or compensated less conditional on the automation.

The phrasing

...a protracted struggle...

nevertheless seems a fitting description for the near-term future of employment as it pertains to the incorporation of AI into work.

T431 29 Dec 2024 4:36 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: AlphaAndOmega’s Shortform

I decided to run the same question through the latest models to gauge their improvements.

Not exactly sure if there is much advantage at all in you having done this, but I feel inclined to say Thank You for persisting in persuading your cousin to at least consider concerns regarding AI, even if he perceptually filters those concerns to mostly regard job automation over others, such as a global catastrophe.

In my own life, over the last several years, I have found it difficult to persuade those close to me to really consider concerns from AI.

I thought that capabilities advancing observably before them might stoke them to think more about their own future and how possibly to behave and or live differently conditional on different AI capabilities, but this has been of little avail.

Expanding capabilities seem to best dissolve skepticism but conversations seem to have not had as large an effect as I would have expected. I’ve not thought or acted as much as I want to on how to coordinate more of humanity around decision-making regarding AI (or the consequences of AI), partially since I do not have a concrete notion where to steer humanity or justification for where to steer (even I knew it was highly likely I was actually contributing to the steering through my actions).

T431 29 Dec 2024 4:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thac0’s comment on: The average rationalist IQ is about 122
The second paragraph puts into words something I’ve noticed but not really mentally formalized before. Some anecdotal evidence from my own life in support of the claims made in this paragraph: I’ve met individuals whose tested IQ exceeds those of other, lower but not much lower, IQ individuals I know who are more educated / trained in epistemological thinking and tangential disciplines. For none of the individual-pairs I have in mind would I declare that one person “ran circles around” the other, however, the difference (advantage going to the lower but better “trained” IQ individual) in conversational dynamics were notable enough for me to remember well. The catch here is the accuracy of the IQ claims made by some of these individuals, as some did not personally reveal their scores to me.

T431 23 Sep 2024 2:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: PatrickDFarley’s comment on: Laziness death spirals
So far I’ve not had this issue (i.e, …that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later...) with my obligations but have had it with some private projects. Infrequently referencing my obligations in to-do list format allows them to stress me adequately, as they occur first on my mind and aren’t detracted from by the gravity of the other tasks I have, which would be easily visible and “present” if on a nearby to-do list.

Having a complex task system containing both job-related obligations and private work tasks somewhat deprioritizes the job-related obligations for me ^[1], relative to how I believe most people might prioritize their job-related obligations, and the near absence of my multiple to-do lists has allowed me, of late, to “calibrate my stress” (the levels of stress I mention here are not severe).

Do you find that you’re able to mentally keep track of things better than before...

I am better mentally able to keep track of job-related obligations (which, for the time being and as far as I’ve surmised, are more important than my private projects / tasks) but less able to remember private project tasks. The magnitude of a task that comes to mind naturally is felt more strongly than if I had proceeded through the same task from a list. I’ve been tackling tasks that cause me higher levels of stress sooner.
1. ↩︎
  Why? I expect that I have more trouble than is average separating “job” versus “non-job” work, meaning that how much I value one over the other oscillates.

T431 22 Sep 2024 1:05 UTC
9 points
2
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Laziness death spirals
W.r.t. maintaining a to-do list, I’ve noticed that, for me, at this time in my life (the last year or so), seldomly referencing a to-do has aided me in more quickly getting my work finished (both at my job and with my projects). As a result of seldomly referencing (looking at / thinking about) the to-do list, my behavior surrounding task completion has changed: I now pause, think of a task, and then decide to do the task, knowing that while I am doing this task I am getting closer to my end, whereas previously I could not be doing any task with often thinking about the other tasks remaining on the to-do list. Of late, there is just me and the task at hand, with very rare planning sessions, usually on the order of every 2-4 weeks where I reference a to-do list.

Historically, I’ve maintained long to-do lists, sorted by urgency and importance. Oftentimes I would go back and forth between tasks, i.e. task-switching, within the same day. To counter this, I would maintain another to-do list (keeping the longer one away), where this one I’d keep before me during my tasks, with a single written task, which I would cross out once completed. Despite these methods (the “backlog” and the one-task-at-a-time list), I found that, at times, the existence of these to-do lists resulted in my mind frequently reciting their items, and this recitation was enough to pull me away from the task at hand.

I’ve not attempted to quantitatively measure my productivity, so I do not have metrics to coincide with the aforementioned change in productivity.

T431 26 Apr 2024 1:36 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Josh Mitchell’s comment on: My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia

it very much depends on where the user came from

Can you provide any further detail here, i.e. be more specific on origin-stratified-retention rates? (I would appreciate this, even if this might require some additional effort searching)

T431 1 Apr 2024 0:06 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain
Similar situation in my life...there are times when I am attempting to fall asleep and I realize suddenly that I am clenching my teeth and that there is considerable tension in my face. Beginning from my closed eyes down to my mouth I relax my facial muscles and I find it becomes easy for me to fall asleep.

In waking life too there are instances where I recognize my facial and bodily tension but I notice these situations less often than when I am trying to sleep. Being conscious of tension in my body and then addressing that tension when it occurs has on occasion made me calmer.

I am uncertain regarding the utility of more expensive interventions and or intensive investigations for alleviating tension, and have not really looked into it (but want to, somewhat).

T431 13 Jan 2024 20:28 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: What good is G-factor if you’re dumped in the woods? A field report from a camp counselor.
Maybe the “I love this” refers to an appreciation for the existence of a post like this one on LW, not the content (i.e., the child’s unusual and partially unsettling behavior) of this post; I do think a “reference to the post existing in the LW ecosystem” is a less probable scenario than “reference to the content of the post”. Anyway, I find the content somewhat unsettling, but appreciate that I saw a post like this one today on LW.