random thoughts. no pretense that any of this is original or useful for anyone but me or even correct
It’s ok to want the world to be better and to take actions to make that happen but unproductive to be frustrated about it or to complain that a plan which should work in a better world doesn’t work in this world. To make the world the way you want it to be, you have to first understand how it is. This sounds obvious when stated abstractly but is surprisingly hard to adhere to in practice.
It would be really nice to have some evolved version of calibration training where I take some historical events and try to predict concrete questions about what happened, and give myself immediate feedback and keep track of my accuracy and calibration. Backtesting my world model so to speak. Might be a bit difficult to measure accuracy improvments due to non iid ness of the world, but worth trying the naive thing regardless. Would be interesting to try and autogen using GPT3.
Feedback loops are important. Unfortunately, from the inside it’s very easy to forget. In particular, setting up feedback loops is often high friction, because it’s hard to measure the thing we care about. Fixing this general problem is probably hard but in the meantime I can try to setup feedback loops for important things like productivity, world modelling, decision making, etc
Lots of things have very counterintuitive or indirect values. If you don’t take this into account and you make decisions based on maximizing value you might end up macnamara-ing yourself hard.
The stages of learning something: (1) “this is super overwhelming! I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. there are so many things I need to keep track of. just trying to wrap my mind around it makes me feel slightly queasy” (2) “hmm this seems to actually make some sense, I’m starting to get the hang of this” (3) “this is so simple and obviously true, I’ve always known it to be true, I can’t believe anyone doesn’t understand this” (you start noticing that your explanations of the thing become indistinguishable from the things you originally felt overwhelmed by) (4) “this new thing [that builds on top of the thing you just learned] is super overwhelming! I don’t think I’ll ever understand it”
The feeling of regret really sucks. This is a bad thing, because it creates an incentive to never reflect on things or realize your mistakes. This shows up as a quite painful aversion to reflecting on mistakes, doing a postmortem, and improving. I would like to somehow trick my brain into reframing things somehow. Maybe thinking of it as a strict improvement over the status quo of having done things wrong? Or maybe reminding myself that the regret will be even worse if I don’t do anything because I’ll regret not reflecting in addition
random thoughts. no pretense that any of this is original or useful for anyone but me or even correct
It’s ok to want the world to be better and to take actions to make that happen but unproductive to be frustrated about it or to complain that a plan which should work in a better world doesn’t work in this world. To make the world the way you want it to be, you have to first understand how it is. This sounds obvious when stated abstractly but is surprisingly hard to adhere to in practice.
It would be really nice to have some evolved version of calibration training where I take some historical events and try to predict concrete questions about what happened, and give myself immediate feedback and keep track of my accuracy and calibration. Backtesting my world model so to speak. Might be a bit difficult to measure accuracy improvments due to non iid ness of the world, but worth trying the naive thing regardless. Would be interesting to try and autogen using GPT3.
Feedback loops are important. Unfortunately, from the inside it’s very easy to forget. In particular, setting up feedback loops is often high friction, because it’s hard to measure the thing we care about. Fixing this general problem is probably hard but in the meantime I can try to setup feedback loops for important things like productivity, world modelling, decision making, etc
self self improvement improvement: feeling guilty about not self improving enough and trying to fix your own ability to fix your own abilities
Lots of things have very counterintuitive or indirect values. If you don’t take this into account and you make decisions based on maximizing value you might end up macnamara-ing yourself hard.
The stages of learning something: (1) “this is super overwhelming! I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. there are so many things I need to keep track of. just trying to wrap my mind around it makes me feel slightly queasy” (2) “hmm this seems to actually make some sense, I’m starting to get the hang of this” (3) “this is so simple and obviously true, I’ve always known it to be true, I can’t believe anyone doesn’t understand this” (you start noticing that your explanations of the thing become indistinguishable from the things you originally felt overwhelmed by) (4) “this new thing [that builds on top of the thing you just learned] is super overwhelming! I don’t think I’ll ever understand it”
The feeling of regret really sucks. This is a bad thing, because it creates an incentive to never reflect on things or realize your mistakes. This shows up as a quite painful aversion to reflecting on mistakes, doing a postmortem, and improving. I would like to somehow trick my brain into reframing things somehow. Maybe thinking of it as a strict improvement over the status quo of having done things wrong? Or maybe reminding myself that the regret will be even worse if I don’t do anything because I’ll regret not reflecting in addition