See also: the guide by Alex Vermeer is fruitful for reviewing the past and planning the following years in an analytical and systematic way.
yagudin(Misha Yagudin)
I predict that a lot of people who would take rationalist lent’s advice seriously would try to quite the same things and there are others who has hit on a good diet of experience that they could try to emulate. So It would be helpful to have a list of diets for quitting unwanted behaviour. Feel free to leave your recipes as a reply to this comment.
Youtube
I permanently blocked the website in all browsers I use. I use command line tool youtube-dl to download the videos I want/need to watch. This workflow gives me an option to watch videos (and also some friction to reevaluate the decision to watch a video); but prevents me from engaging with youtube, the risky game I might ‘loss’ otherwise.
I associate myself with the unconscious-self more and more (note: an unconscious-self is bigger than an elephant-self because some modules in a brain are deliberate & analytical, but not directly available to the verbal/conscious rider; I very much agree with @moridinamael’s comment above).
Conscious-self seems more like press secretary for more hard-working unconscious-self, who is in charge of most of the decision-making. But, ugh, everyone experienced how «conscious ruled unconscious» (≈ will-power). I think the role of conscious-self in «the use of willpower» is to communicate from long-term modules to short-term modules of unconscious-self.
«Inner Game of Tennis» contains some recommendations on how to augment communication between the modules. I also found TDT-mindset helpful to tell early-evolved modules what later-evolved modules think is worth doing.
It seems to me, that Dacyn’s code executes
[stuff]
at least once for anyn
. But iffn <= 0
, originalwhile
loop does not execute its body. Dacyn’s code looks like ado-while
loop.
Somehow related papers in ML / DL:
Keeping NN Simple by Minimizing the Description Length of the Weights (Hinton, 1997);
Binarized Neural Networks (Courbariaux, 2016).
The most in-depth, but a bit outdated (c. 2012) article on sleep is written by Piotr Wozniak, whom you might know as a pioneer of spaced repetition software. The article is ~300 pages long. It includes summary & myths sections which are a bit longer than this post.
You are welcome! A general concern about the pace of scientific progress.
I think this paper, which models winner-takes-all, public knowledge situations (ex. the space race between the US and USSR) by «Guess Who?» game, is interesting formal model of the first half of this post.
“Guess Who?” is a popular two player game where players ask “Yes”/“No” questions to search for their opponent’s secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal strategy is explicitly found. Contrary to popular belief, performing a binary search is not always optimal. Instead, the optimal strategy for the player who trails is to make certain bold plays in an attempt catch up. This is discovered by first analyzing a continuous version of the game where players play indefinitely and the winner is never decided after finitely many rounds.
A very successful crowdfunding for printing HPMoR has happened in Russia. 21k books are going to be printed: some of them will go to public/university libraries, some to gifted students. More good HPMoR related news are coming from Russia, but too early to announce them.
Divestment and mission hedging are examples of politically motivated finance activity. Divestment seems to be somewhat popular, but inefficient. Mission hedging is not well-known, but probably quite good.
Wikipedia page for ‘Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia’ is a great source of useful sleep related habits.
Great to hear!
An example from Feynman’s «The Character of Physical Law»:
The next guy who did something great was Maxwell, who obtained the laws of electricity and magnetism. What he did was this. He put together all the laws of electricity, due to Faraday and other people who came before him, and he looked at them and realized that they were mathematically inconsistent. In order to straighten it out he had to add one term to an equation. He did this by inventing for himself a model of idler wheels and gears and so on in space. He found what the new law was – but nobody paid much attention because they did not believe in the idler wheels. We do not believe in the idler wheels today, but the equations that he obtained were correct. So the logic may be wrong but the answer right.
I am quite sure, that Moscow’s LW will celebrate a Secular Solstice on 21 or 22 of Dec.
Alexey, happy birthday to your podcast! I’ve just subscribed and hope you would post consistently in the future. How many subscribers do you have?
Rohin, thank you for the especially long and informative newsletter.
When there are more samples, we get a lower validation loss [...]
I guess you’ve meant
a higher validation loss
?
Thanks for the post. I would recommend reading the original blog post by Noam Brown as it has the proper level of exposition and more details/nuances.
Overall, it seems that Pluribus is conceptually very similar to Libratus; sadly, no new insights about >2-player games. My impression is that because poker players don’t collude/cooperate too much, playing something close to an equilibrium against them will make you rich.
Two interesting questions arise:
could Alpha Zero beat the best human-computer team;
would human-AZ team systematically beat AZ.
I think the answer to the first question is positive, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make much sense of the available raw data on Freestyle chess, so my opinion is based on the marginal revolution blog-post. The negative answer to the second question might make some optimists about human-AI cooperation like Kasparov less optimistic.