Yeah, that training took some time, but it worked. I can now write melodies and chords from imagination pretty easily. Have had this skill for awhile now. It’s very useful, though of course not a golden ticket.
My current challenge in music is just coming up with interesting stuff, I think this challenge isn’t gonna run out anytime soon.
I think in music you quickly learn to hear and play the right notes, and then it’s just never a problem anymore. The real difficulty is having something to say. In writing and visual arts I think it’s also like that: you learn a basic level of skill, and then it’s all about what you say.
It is fun, but there is only a certain amount I can use my hands before I get RSI on any given day.
Might be worth experimenting a bit with finding more comfortable ways to play. Lots of people (including me) can play the guitar for many hours every day with no problems. But it’s hard for a teacher to tell from outside what’s crampy and what isn’t, you need to rely on your feelings for this.
Cool. If you go with it, I’d be super interested to know how it went, and lmk if you need any help or elaboration on the idea.
Last year I had an idea for a debate protocol which got pretty highly upvoted.
I think once you’re past a certain basic level in math, it’s feasible to continue learning pretty much by yourself, just download problem sets and go through them. But it’s a bit lonely. Going to classes lets you meet other people who are into the same thing as you! Shared love for something is what makes communities happen, I got this idea in Jim Butcher of all places. And the piece of paper itself is also quite nice, it can come in handy unexpectedly, and getting it now is probably easier than getting it later. So on the whole I’d lean toward getting the degree.
About the philosophical stuff, I think “the world and/or my life will be over soon anyway” is kind of a nasty idea, because it makes you feel like nothing’s worth doing. That’s no way for a human being to be! You’re not a potato! Hence it’s better to act on the assumption that neither the world nor your life will be over anytime soon.
Also check out “personalized pagerank”, where the rating shown to each user is “rooted” in what kind of content this user has upvoted in the past. It’s a neat solution to many problems.
Crosstalk is definitely a problem, e-drums and pads have it too. But are you sure the tradeoff is inescapable? Imagine the tines sit on separate pads, or on the same pad but far from each other. (Or close to each other, but with deep grooves between them, so that the distance through the connecting material is large.) This thought experiment shows that damping and crosstalk can be small at the same time. So maybe you can reduce damping but not increase crosstalk, by changing the instrument’s shape or materials.
Reading a book, or even watching a movie, is less stimulating than ancestral activities like hunting or fighting. So maybe stimulation by itself isn’t the problem, and instead of “superstimuli” we should be worried about activities that are low effort and/or fruitless. From that perspective, reading a book can be both difficult and fruitful (depending on the book—reading Dostoevsky or Fitzgerald isn’t the same as reading a generic romance or young adult novel). And creativity is both difficult and fruitful. So we shouldn’t put these things on par with watching tiktok.
Maybe you could reduce the damping, so that when muting you can feel your finger stopping the vibration? It seems to me that more feedback of this kind is usually a good thing for the player. Also the vibration could give you a continuous “envelope” signal to be used later.
I think Diffractor’s post shows that logical induction does hit a certain barrier, which isn’t quite diagonalization, but seems to me about as troublesome:
As the trader goes through all sentences, its best-case value will be unbounded, as it buys up larger and larger piles of sentences with lower and lower prices. This behavior is forbidden by the logical induction criterion… This doesn’t seem like much, but it gets extremely weird when you consider that the limit of a logical inductor, P_inf, is a constant distribution, and by this result, isn’t a logical inductor! If you skip to the end and use the final, perfected probabilities of the limit, there’s a trader that could rack up unboundedly high value!
For similar instruments, you’ve seen the array mbira, right?
For marking the ends of notes, to me the most intuitive solution would be muting with fingers, but I’m not sure how that translates to electronics.
If a student is genuinely acting in bad faith—attending a class and ruining it for their peers—then they should be removed from the class and sent to a counselor/social worker.
The number of such students is larger than you think. But the more important question is what the social worker would do with the student—what tools would be available to them. Because by default the student will just disrupt another class tomorrow and so on. There isn’t any magic method to make disruptive students non-disruptive; schools would love to have access to such magic if it existed.
Sorry for maybe naive question. Which other behaviors X could be defeated by this technique of “find n instructions that induce X and n that don’t”? Would it work for X=unfriendliness, X=hallucination, X=wrong math answers, X=math answers that are wrong in one specific way, and so on?
Orwell is one of my personal heroes, 1984 was a transformative book to me, and I strongly recommend Homage to Catalonia as well.
That said, I’m not sure making theories of art is worth it. Even when great artists do it (Tolkien had a theory of art, and Oscar Wilde, and Flannery O’Connor, and almost every artist if you look close enough), it always seems to be the kind of theory which suits that artist and nobody else. Would advice like “good prose is like a windowpane” or “efface your own personality” improve the writing of, say, Hunter S. Thompson? Heck no, his writing is the opposite of that and charming for it! Maybe the only possible advice to an artist is to follow their talent, and advising anything more specific is as likely to hinder as help.
I think for good emotions the feel-it-completely thing happens naturally anyway.
To me it’s less about thoughts and more about emotions. And not about doing it all the time, but only when I’m having some intense emotion and need to do something about it.
For example, let’s say I’m angry about something. I imagine there’s a knob in my mind: make the emotion stronger or weaker. (Or between feeling it less, and feeling it more.) What I usually do is turn the knob up. Try to feel the emotion more completely and in more detail, without trying to push any of it away. What usually happens next is the emotion kinda decides that it’s been heard and goes away: a few minutes later I realize that whatever I was feeling is no longer as intense or urgent. Or I might even forget it entirely and find my mind thinking of something else.
It’s counterintuitive but it’s really how it works for me; been doing it for over a decade now. It’s the closest thing to a mental cheat code that I know.
There’s an amazing HN comment that I mention everytime someone links to this essay. It says don’t do what the essay says, you’ll make yourself depressed. Instead do something a bit different, and maybe even opposite.
Let’s say for example you feel annoyed by the fat checkout lady. DFW advises you to step over your annoyance, imagine the checkout lady is caring for her sick husband, and so on. But that kind of approach to your own feelings will hurt you in the long run, and maybe even seriously hurt you. Instead, the right thing is to simply feel annoyed at the checkout lady. Let the feeling come and be heard. After it’s heard, it’ll be gone by itself soon enough.
Here’s the whole comment, to save people the click:
DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis (“This is water”) is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.
To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It’s the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; “Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops.”
In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.
Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.
The “trick” to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the “master” DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I’m disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples’ lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.
Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can’t be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it’s an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.
There’s something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.
[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]
And another comment from a different person making the same point:
Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace’s.
In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.
Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it’s inside his head, it’s intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.
He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base—CBT and it’s variants.
Yeah, this works.
I’m a bit torn on where fairness should be properly placed. For example, if Alice is the only one deciding and Bob has no power to punish her at all, it seems like fairness should still come into Alice’s consideration. So maybe it should be encoded into the utility function, not into the strategic behavior running on top of it. But that would mean we need to take actions that benefit random aliens while going about our daily lives, and I’m not sure we want that.