Yaakov T

Karma: 233

Yaakov T 20 Jan 2014 2:56 UTC
39 points
on: Rationality Quotes January 2014
Train your tongue to say “I don’t know”, lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud

Yaakov T 24 Nov 2013 5:18 UTC
32 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I took the survey.

Thank you for putting this together Some of the questions were unclear to me, for example: does living with family mean my parents or my spouse and children? (I guessed the former, but was unsure) For the politics question, there should be an option for not identifying with any label (or if that will lead to everyone not wanting to be labeled an option for disinterest in politics could be an alternative.) Should an atheist who practices a religion (e.g. buddhism) skip the question on religion? P(aliens), this question leaves out the time dimension which seems important to establishing a probability for aliens, e.g. if aliens live 5 bilion light years away, are we asked the probability that there were aliens there 5 billion years ago such that we could receive a message from them now, or whether there are aliens now, which we will not be able to discover for another few billion years. P(supernatural) its not clear what counts as a supernatural event, e.g. god is included even though most would not define god as an event nor as occurring since the beginning of the universe (since if god created the universe he is either nontemporal or prior to the universe) for the CFAR questions I wasn’t sure what qualified as a ” plausible-seeming technique or approach for being more rational / more productive / happier / having better social relationships / having more accurate beliefs / etc.” does it have to be a brand new technique, or even a modification of one already known. Is it askeing about generic techniques or even domain specific ones? Also, most techniques I try are not ones I hear about, but rather ones I come up with on my own, I dont know if others here are similar. Also all of the change questions seemed poorly defined and unclear.

Yaakov T 22 May 2022 17:30 UTC
24 points
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—May 2022
It also reminds me of Richard Feynman not wanting a position at the institute for advance study.
“I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I am making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say “I’m teaching my class.”
If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.”
— Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Yaakov T 26 Nov 2013 1:15 UTC
15 points
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I noticed a bunch of people saying that they will donate the money if they win. I find that a surprisingly irrational sentiment for lesswrong. Unless I am missing something, it seems people are ignoring the principle of the fungibility of money. It seems like the more rational thing to do would be to commit to donating 60$ whether or not you win. (If your current wealth level is a factor in your decision, such that you will only donate with the higher wealth level with the prize, then this can be modified to donating whether or not you win if you receive a windfall of 60$ from any source (your grandmother gives a generous birthday present, your coworker takes you out to lunch every day this week, you find money in the street, you get a surprisingly large bonus at work, your stocks increase more then expected etc))

Yaakov T 19 Aug 2022 9:48 UTC
10 points
7
on: Alignment’s phlogiston
You might find the book Is Water H2O? by Hasok Chang, 2012 useful. It was mentioned by Adam Shimi in this post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wi3upQibefMcFs5to/levels-of-pluralism

Yaakov T 2 Sep 2013 2:42 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2013
Based on the Hebrew original a more accurate translation would be: “The beginning of knowledge is to acquire knowledge, and in all of your acquisitions acquire understanding” pointing to two important principles.
1. First to gain the relevant body of knowledge and only then to begin theorizing
2. to focus our wealth and energy on knowledge

Yaakov T 27 Jan 2023 10:41 UTC
9 points
on: Shoulder Advisors 101
I really liked this post since it took something I did intuitively and haphazardly and gave it a handle by providing the terms to start practicing it intentionally. This had at least two benefits:
First it allowed me to use this technique in a much wider set of circumstances, and to improve the voices that I already have. Identifying the phenomenon allowed it to move from a knack which showed up by luck, to a skill.
Second, it allowed me to communicate the experience more easily to others, and open the possibility for them to use it as well. Unlike many lesswrong posts, I found that the technique in this post spoke to a bunch of people outside of the lesswrong community. For example, one friend who liked this idea. tried applying it to developing an Elijah the Prophet figure that he could interact with.

Yaakov T 17 Aug 2014 19:47 UTC
7 points
in reply to: somervta’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2014
according to this website (http://ravallirepublic.com/news/opinion/viewpoint/article_876e97ba-1aff-11e2-9a10-0019bb2963f4.html) it is part of ‘aphorisms for leo baeck’ (which I think is printed in ‘ideas and opinions’ but I don’t have access to the book right now to check)

Yaakov T 23 Dec 2013 1:14 UTC
6 points
on: Building Phenomenological Bridges
typo: There seems to be an extra ‘Y’ in column 4 of the first image (it should be CYYY instead of CYYYY)

[Question] Why are probabilities represented as real numbers instead of rational numbers?

Yaakov T27 Oct 2022 11:23 UTC

5 points

9 comments1 min readLW link

Yaakov T 2 Sep 2013 2:43 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2013
It seems like Proverbs has a lot of important content for gaining rationality, perhaps it should be added to our reading lists

Yaakov T 28 May 2023 12:30 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: drocta’s comment on: All AGI Safety questions welcome (especially basic ones) [May 2023]
@drocta @Cookiecarver We started writing up an answer to this question for Stampy. If you have any suggestions to make it better I would really appreciate it. Are there important factors we are leaving out? Something that sounds off? We would be happy for any feedback you have either here or on the document itself https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tbubYvI0CJ1M8ude-tEouI4mzEI5NOVrGvFlMboRUaw/edit#

Yaakov T 22 Jan 2014 3:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Book Review: How Learning Works
A rubric is a tool for assessment. It identifies criterion for evaluating work by identifying the categories of achievement and the measurements of levels of achievement in each category. This seems like a basic summary with examples: http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/rubricar.htm

Yaakov T 20 Sep 2023 12:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: bokov’s comment on: Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/vnm-theorem

Yaakov T 16 Apr 2023 14:44 UTC
LW: 3 AF: 2
AF
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: [Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 9. Takeaways from neuro 2/2: On AGI motivation
But in that kind of situation, wouldn’t those people also pick A over B for the same reason?

Yaakov T 19 Dec 2013 1:45 UTC
3 points
in reply to: yrudoy’s comment on: Beautiful Probability
Thanks, I understood the mathematical point but was wondering if there is any practical significance since it seems in the real world that we cannot make such an assumption, and that in the real world we should trust the results of the two researchers differently (since the one researcher likely published no matter what, whereas the second probably only published the experiments which came out favorably (even if he didn’t publish false information)). What is the practical import of this idea? In the real world with all of people’s biases shouldn’t we distinguish between the two researchers as a general heuristic for good research standards?

(If this is addressed in a different post on this site feel free to point me there since I have not read the majority of the site)

Yaakov T 17 Dec 2013 2:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Beautiful Probability
Does the publication of the result tell you the same thing, since the fact that it was published is a result of the plans?

Yaakov T 3 Jun 2014 11:57 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2014
probably not, but why are you certain

Yaakov T 18 Feb 2014 2:02 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RowanE’s comment on: A defense of Senexism (Deathism)
yes and that was the meaning of my initial comment, and that is a concern in today’s world where we do have limited resources so that not everyone would be able to make use of such a technology. The country that has it (or the subset of people that have it within one country) will be motivated to defend their resources necessary to use it., This isn’t an argument against such research in a world without any scarcity, but that isn’t our world.

I am still not sure whether it is likely to be more beneficial or not for heavily emotional and biased humans like us.

Yaakov T 16 Feb 2014 19:04 UTC
2 points
on: A defense of Senexism (Deathism)
To those who think that death should be a choice. What about the benefits of knowing that we are mortal, which death by choice doesn’t allow for. e.g. as a counter force to arrogance and as a force to act now, and so as we age to start reevaluating our priorities, in other words, the benefits while we live to knowing that we are mortal may outweigh the benefit of immortality. I suspect these concerns have been dealt with on this site, so if they have feel free to link me to an appropriate post instead of writing a new response,

Yaakov T

[Question] Why are prob­a­bil­ities rep­re­sented as real num­bers in­stead of ra­tio­nal num­bers?

[Question] Why are probabilities represented as real numbers instead of rational numbers?