I was texting multiple Discords for a certain type of mental “heuristic”, or “mental motion”, or “badass thing that Planecrash!Keltham or HPMOR!Harry would think to themselves, in order to guide their own thoughts into fruitful and creative and smart directions”. Someone commented that this could also be reframed as “language-model prompts to your own mind” or “language-model simulations of other people in your own mind”.
I’ve decided to clarify what I meant, and why even smart people could benefit from seemingly hokey tricks like this.
Heuristics/LMs-of-other-people are something like, a mental hack to trick our godshatter human brains into behaving smarter than we reasonably would have if left unprompted, due to our computational (and in particular our “recall” memory) limitations.
Like, yes, optimal Bayesian reasoners (plus a few Competent People who might exist, like Yudkowsky or Wentworth or mumblemumble) can do this unprompted, presumably because they have years of practice at the “mental motions” and/or better recall ability (combined, of course, with the rarity of having read any of the Sequences at all, to make a lot of this stuff explicit). Thus, the heuristics help those of us who don’t consciously remember every Bayes-approximating tip we’ve ever heard about a given mental situation.
I was texting multiple Discords for a certain type of mental “heuristic”, or “mental motion”, or “badass thing that Planecrash!Keltham or HPMOR!Harry would think to themselves, in order to guide their own thoughts into fruitful and creative and smart directions”. Someone commented that this could also be reframed as “language-model prompts to your own mind” or “language-model simulations of other people in your own mind”.
I’ve decided to clarify what I meant, and why even smart people could benefit from seemingly hokey tricks like this.
Heuristics/LMs-of-other-people are something like, a mental hack to trick our godshatter human brains into behaving smarter than we reasonably would have if left unprompted, due to our computational (and in particular our “recall” memory) limitations.
Like, yes, optimal Bayesian reasoners (plus a few Competent People who might exist, like Yudkowsky or Wentworth or mumblemumble) can do this unprompted, presumably because they have years of practice at the “mental motions” and/or better recall ability (combined, of course, with the rarity of having read any of the Sequences at all, to make a lot of this stuff explicit). Thus, the heuristics help those of us who don’t consciously remember every Bayes-approximating tip we’ve ever heard about a given mental situation.
What are the best ones you’ve got?
(sources: discord chats on public servers) Why do I believe X?
What information do I already have, that could be relevant here?
What would have to be true such that X would be a good idea?
If I woke up tomorrow and found a textbook explaining how this problem was solved, what’s paragraph 1?
What is the process by which X was selected?