Maybe we should have the current system school as a fallback, and the offer would be: “You can learn things on your own ahead of time and get paid for that, or failing that you will learn in the classroom and not get paid for that.”
Viliam
Karma: 27,708
A problem with “if I build the superhuman AI, I will rule the world” is that Trump may take it away from you at gunpoint at the last moment.
(Kinda reminds me of the “knowledge is power / no, power is power” scene from the Game of Thrones.)
Doesn’t “our culture is good” imply that you should keep all your current cultural memes, including the junk ones and the harmful ones?
The key point is these must be occasional. If I ordered takeaway for dinner every day for my family of 5, I’d be spending an extra 1000 dollars each month just on food.
Yeah, this is a very important thing. Buying an expensive computer once a year is cheaper than buying pizza every day, and yet many people are okay with the latter, but surprised about you “wasting money” if you do the former.
Even when you spend money to make your life easier or more pleasant, you can still consider how much easiness or pleasure you buy per dollar, and only take the good trades. There is a difference between “I will suffer in order to maximize my savings” and “I will spend some money to make myself happier”, but there is also a difference between “I will spend some money to make myself happier” and “I will waste money in a way that doesn’t even make me happier”.
Also, some people or companies will try to extract money from you. Even if you decide to spend more money, it doesn’t mean that you should do it exactly the way other people are nudging you to do. The companies will put some ads in front of your eyes, and you may go like “hm, yeah I guess I could spend some money on this, it seems nice”, but maybe it would be better to spend the same money in a completely different way. For example, you could spend money to have other people set up furniture for you… but you could also spend money to set up your own workshop where you can build your own furniture, and perhaps that would be more fun. Similarly, you could pay someone to cook your meals… but you could also pay someone to teach you how to cook new meals.
you should work to become a virtuous person who genuinely cares about people and then things will work naturally.
You should work to become an attractive person, and then people will fight for the privilege of being your friend.
Rich and stingy people are definitely a thing. Some people are assholes and wouldn’t help you even if it cost them literally nothing; knowing that you suffer makes them feel good.
Honor basically means status, right? In better cases it means “respected for having skills or doing something good”. In worse cases it means “known as a person capable and willing to hurt others”.
For example, if someone accuses an AI of being a parrot, the AI should defend its honor by providing evidence to the contrary. But also, AI should not publicly murder all AI safety researchers, just because their doubts about inherent AI safety has offended its honor.
Sounds interesting, but I would like to see some specific examples. I don’t mean examples of useful things that the authors choose to classify as protocols, but examples of when the act of classifying something as a protocol made it easier to solve.
Yes.
An individual human is limited by only having 24 hours a day, a large part of that taken by “maintenance” (sleep, job, exercise, preparing food; all the things that you need to do regularly even if they are not your expertise), and only what is left can be spread across the things you want to become great at.
And while some people are good at collecting lots of money quickly, which allows them to skip (job) or outsource (preparing food) some of the maintenance, they are ultimately still limited by the 24 hours.
I think the strongest reason for why the original narrative was changed/abandoned is simply that the average rationalist got older than in the days of Sequences. Generalizing from my own example, when you are a student, it seems like you have unlimited time and energy, the only problem is to focus it on something useful (study science instead of pseudoscience, avoid getting politically mindkilled, etc.). When you later get a job, it may consume most of your time and energy, and when you have kids, they will take the rest. Suddenly your options get very limited, and you must rely on the existing infrastructure (e.g. many people send their kids to schools, because they need two incomes, which is incompatible with homeschooling).
Also, you will notice that many specialists on self-improvement are actually only good at talking about self-improvement. Which feels like a scam. (For example, Kiyosaki is famous for giving advice on how to run your own business, but in reality all his businesses have failed, except for the “making money by talking about being a successful businessman” business.) They are experts at “talking about X”, without being experts at “X”. Even the spiritual superstars these days often sexually abuse their students, because “talking about moral behavior” and “moral behavior” are two different specializations, and it is difficult to be an expert on both at the same time.
Many successful rationalist get invisible—they spend so much time and energy doing whatever they are successful at, that they don’t have much left for blogging. (Perhaps someone should specialize at interviewing them?) Also, having mastered the basic general lessons, they move into technical details of the thing the specialize at; but those technical details are less interesting for those who chose a different specialization. The visible rationalists are those whose specialization is blogging, because being visible is a part of their job. There is nothing wrong with successful blogging, but I think it is worth noticing explicitly that it is mostly the bloggers who become famous.
LessWrong is a communication infrastructure. Lighthaven is a physical implementation of it. They help a lot. The obvious question is whether we could go further in this direction. What other pieces of infrastructure could be build?
People used to talk a lot about group houses. Having rationalists live close to each other seems like a great thing. But then we got a lot of drama. Or maybe it’s just a selection bias, that the failures became famous, and the successes remain unnoticed? I don’t know.
...I probably won’t write anything smart here, but I share the intuition that the next needed thing is some piece of infrastructure, in the wide sense. We are not a set of individuals that will individually become superheroes, but we could have a few heroes who will improve themselves and create tools that will allow others to be 10% more efficient (but creating and maintaining the tool becomes the hero’s full-time job, so we will need another hero for another tool, and maybe we are bottlenecked on human talent), and perhaps this effect could accumulate.
What I find confusing is that people talk about things like “balanced diet” and “eating a little of everything” as a solution to designing your diet. No, it is not enough to say that you need to draw randomly from a set, if you do not describe what the set looks like and what metric you use to choose randomly.
Imagine an alien species that can consume green circles, green squares, or red triangles. Does “balanced diet” refer to 1⁄3 green circles, 1⁄3 green squares, and 1⁄3 red triangles? Or does it refer to 1⁄2 green meals and 1⁄2 red meals, with green meals being 1⁄4 green circles and 1⁄4 red squares? Or maybe we should classify the triangles as acute, right, and obtuse, and then the balanced diet is 1⁄5 green circles, 1⁄5 green squares, 1⁄5 red acute triangles...?
Exactly the same thing applies to human diet. How much of everything is one supposed to eat? If you say something like the same amount from each category, then it depends on whether you have e.g. “vegetables” and “grains” and “berries” as separate categories, or one “plant-based” category. Etc.
I was taught at elementary school that Alexander the Great founded a city called Alexandria. I have read an encyclopedia at home, which said that he actually founded multiple cities with that name. When I said it at the exam, the teacher made fun of me in front of the class—the idea of multiple cities having the same name was clearly absurd. At that moment history became my most hated subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ariana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Eschate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_in_the_Caucasus
(Overall, my daughter’s school is not bad, but in three years we will apply her to a better one.)
Is there a moment in each gifted child’s life when you know so much that everyone accuses you of making things up?
My 8 years old daughter was trying to tell her classmates about tardigrades—tiny animals that are so resilient they can survive extreme temperature, pressure, starvation, dehydration, radiation, air deprivation, even exposure to outer space.
First her classmates accused her of believing AI hallucinations. (Yes, my daughter often asks AI for information. Yeah, we told her not to believe everything. So far, the AI was mostly reliable.) Then they called a teacher, and she said that those are probably made up animals from my daughter’s stories. (She likes to invent various stories, sometimes she writes them down or records them, but mostly just tells other people.)
I guess it does not increase credibility to mention that tardigrades are also called “water bears” in English, “slow ones” in Slovak, and “little turtles” in Czech.
So my wife printed a short summary from Wikipedia and a few other pages, and gave it to her to show at school. I am curious whether it will convince anyone.
Whenever I would look up how to do something (open a file, create a folder, play a sound), I’d find a 20-line monstrosity given as a minimal example on Stack Overflow
I had a similar experience trying to find something useful about Java. Some things are used together so often that I suspect most people don’t even know how to use them separately. You ask about one thing, and their shortest example is 500 lines of project setup, dependency injection, and whatever else, where 5 lines would perfectly address your question.
It’s like asking “how can I change a light bulb”, and getting answers like “here is how to renovate your entire house (includes replacing all the light bulbs)”.
Makes me suspect that most people do not understand their craft as deeply as I would prefer. IT development used to be a job for people who were obsessed with technical details; now there are many people who are happy just to put something things together and collect a salary.
That said, in my experience AIs are a huge improvement over Stack Overflow, because you can ask them additional questions and often get the answer you want (where SO would be like “just accept the correct answer, this is not a place for discussion”).
Zig’s policy barred developers from using AI for their PRs and this created operational and cultural mismatches between the Zig and Bun teams. For example, the Bun team couldn’t upstream their contributions to Zig because of this constraint.
According to this comment linked from Hacker News, the problem was the quality of the PR (although it was simultaneously a violation of a policy).
Bun’s Zig fork does not incorporate the changes [required to implement this properly], which means their parallelized semantic analysis implementation will exhibit non-deterministic behavior. That’s pretty much a non-starter for most serious developers: you don’t want your compilation to randomly fail with a nonsense error 30% of the time.
The seeming inconsistency is called Jevons paradox. It’s like, the faster internet becomes, the more time people spend there, although in theory they could just read the same amount of text, only faster, and then stop.
I can imagine various reasons, not such which are the true ones. Some people consider their jobs fun, but may want to see the other unfun jobs gone, like maybe replaced by UBI. For some people, no amount of money is enough, because they can imagine more ambitious goals, whether selfish or altruistic. (You could start your own spaceship company, or single-handedly finance curing some deadly disease.)
It is a useful signal from inside—if you feel more anxious writing about X than about Y, it is a signal you probably know about X less—but it is not useful across people. Some people are okay generating arbitrary amounts of text, other people get anxious whenever they imagine having an audience.
I spent years thinking about how to make a computer game that would teach some math and would be fun to play. Then I saw Sumaze and I feel like a complete idiot—it is so simple that it should have been obvious. I was already kinda exploring not too far in the idea space, but I couldn’t connect the dots.
I already made some maze exploration games. Separately from that, I was considering a mathematical version of something like Sokoban, where you would push stones containing numbers and symbols, until you create a valid equation (e.g. you push “2”, “+”, “2”, “=”, and “4” together in a straight line), but the prototype wasn’t fun at all; too much pushing, and it seems like an artificial needlessly complicated addition to the equation solving.
Now in hindsight, if I just put these two ideas together (instead of Sokoban with numbers and operators, make a maze exploration game with numbers and operations) and aimed for small instead of large levels, I would be almost there. But it didn’t occur to me for years. And now that I see the solution, it seems completely obvious.
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Another idea that seems obvious in hindsight: When you write textbooks, too bad that they are not interactive. When you write interactive educational applications, too bad you sometimes need to add a screen of text to explain some concept. Another problem, with interactive educational apps you could accidentally lose your data; or if you want to use it both at school and at home, you need to create accounts to transfer the data, and that comes with additional complications (privacy concerns, password recovery). The obvious solution to this dilemma—of course only obvious after someone else did it first—is:
Make a product that consist of both a textbook and an application. The textbook explains things, and gives you a few trivial problems to solve on paper. Then you solve more complicated ones in the application, and afterwards write down some of the solutions on paper. That way, you have a paper text to read, and a paper trail of your work, and the interactive application can focus on its main task, and doesn’t have to include a user manual.
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Sometimes the idea becomes so obvious in retrospect that failing to have thought of it seems like stupidity. And people say “we knew” to avoid feeling stupid.
In these cases, I have obvious evidence that I didn’t think of these ideas, so I just… feel stupid.
I think there are two different things: How much sense something makes in theory; and how do you respond to it psychologically. It seems that some people’s “taking ideas seriously” package includes compulsive thinking about things you have not solved yet in theory. As if the only way to make peace with something psychologically is to have a perfectly logical answer, with counter-counter arguments for each possible counter-argument.
But in fact there are many other possible psychological responses, such as not giving a fuck.
I am not opposed to solving theoretical problems, but it seems unlikely to me that I would be able to say something that wasn’t already said many times before. (Okay, one possible approach would be to tell you an infohazard even worse than Roko’s basilisk; that might take your attention away from it. But that would be unkind, and probably would just make you spiral about the new thing instead; or maybe both of them.)
To stop spiraling about anything, you need to realize that there is a gap between the thing you worry about and your response to the thing. You habitually choose one type of response, but it is perfectly possible to choose another.
I also imagine that if you see your enemies researching something, that makes it feel very important to research it, too. (You wouldn’t want to lose a war just because you underestimated the impact of horoscopes.) So if USSR or USA starts to research something for reasons of corruption or stupidity, the other side will do the same, because “if they spend money researching it, there is probably a good reason for that”.
This can escalate, like maybe one side just assigns one person to research the horoscopes, but when the information leaks the other side overreacts and assigns the entire department, etc.
Could possibly be done on purpose? Let’s start dozen lines of bogus research and let the information leak, so that our enemies get confused and start wasting their energy on useless things. With the possibility that other people on our side, who were not informed of this, will also get serious about the research.
Asymmetric incentives? If I have a few budget and assign a few people to research horoscopes, that is an expense I can justify. If I don’t assign anyone to researching horoscopes and they turn out to be crucial, I will get fired for incompetence.
Person A has the capacity to be cruel, but has recently been kind to so many people that when they interacted with you, they just automatically were kind.
Person B enjoys being cruel to various people, and originally also intended to be cruel to you… but then realized that a much cleverer plan would be to be kind to you, and manipulate you to reveal some information that will allow them to be even more cruel towards a third party.
By this logic, B has better character than A.