danlucraft

Karma: 90

danlucraft 13 Jul 2022 8:13 UTC
3 points
3
on: How do AI timelines affect how you live your life?
I think about my young daughters’ lives a lot. One says she wants to be an artist. Another a teacher.
Do those careers make any sense on a timeframe of the next 20 years?
What interests and careers do I encourage in them that will become useless at the slowest rate?
I think about this a lot—and then I mainly do nothing about it, and just encourage them to pursue whatever they like anyway.

danlucraft 5 Jul 2022 10:20 UTC
15 points
0
on: Looking back on my alignment PhD
I actually have a new puppy—and it certainly has taken a little while for him to figure out that kibble is food so this part stood out to me :)
For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is ‘hard-wired’ into the dog
This doesn’t require that dog have a hardwired food classifier. The behaviour is the dog salivating when the dog sees something it recognizes as food, not that the dog is able to recognize all foods. It just needs one hardwired FOOD neuron, that can be attached to a classifier that is later trained. (Idk the technical terms sorry!)
It might still be bullshit—but you’d have to do some experiment that determined whether dogs knew immediately to salivate in the presence of things they know to be food, or if dogs have to learn to salivate in the presence of things they know to be food, which Zitovich’s experiment doesn’t address because he gave the dog stuff it didn’t realize was food.
Unless I’m just missing context, and Pavlov really did think the dog could recognize all types of food that exist from birth...
PS Also congratulations on finishing your PhD. I started one but didn’t finish, so much respect from me.

danlucraft 24 Jun 2014 18:37 UTC
6 points
on: How do you take notes?
All my notes take the form of questions and answers now. I find that notes that can’t be used to challenge me to recall and think about the material are pointless.

Note these are not like SR flashcards, which I have had little luck with outside things such as vocab.

I keep them in markdown in Dropbox, and edit them on my iPad or phone while reading. When I feel like reviewing I have a custom style sheet to present them in a form that it is easy to cover up the answers with one hand.

In terms of deciding what information to capture, I used to fetishise names and dates and things. Nowadays I focus mainly on concepts (if the author names the concept it’s gold) and the outlines of arguments, and try to keep the volume to only the most important info, since everything I put in there I expect to remember.

danlucraft 29 Nov 2013 17:35 UTC
4 points
on: Making the chaff invisible, and getting the wheat ($200 prize too)
Sign up for Songkick.com and track the artists you named and the SF Bay Area metro area. I work at this company and we exist to solve this problem for live music. We only email you about stuff you have previously told us you are interested in.

danlucraft 12 Oct 2013 11:21 UTC
0 points
on: Superintelligence fiction—“Understand”, by Ted Chiang
After reading this story I spent about 30 seconds worrying that my ipad was broken because the display was now tinted pink. Even a restart didn’t fix it. Then I realized.

danlucraft 12 Aug 2013 15:06 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Adele_L’s comment on: Open thread, August 5-11, 2013
Thank you, I’m not sure if I had seen that.

danlucraft 8 Aug 2013 8:43 UTC
5 points
on: Open thread, August 5-11, 2013
What techniques have you used for removing or beating Ugh Fields, with associated +/- figures?

(A search of LW reveals very few suggestions for how to do this.)

danlucraft 8 Aug 2013 8:28 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Improving Enjoyment and Retention Reading Technical Literature
Awesome. I’m going to try this on something (short).

Random thoughts:
- if you are describing a static system, how to represent character arcs? Can a leukocynoid become king?
- there’ll be hundreds and hundreds of characters. But I suppose that’s still better than hundreds and hundreds of random meaningless pieces of jargon.
- this is very like other kinds of constrained writing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing That some of those things are even possible makes me think this is more likely than you might imagine at first glance.

danlucraft 3 Aug 2013 13:45 UTC
14 points
in reply to: DanArmak’s comment on: Rationality Quotes August 2013
In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .

danlucraft 24 Jan 2013 18:13 UTC
0 points
on: On private marriage contracts
“In particular, when it comes to marriage, outside of the aforementioned libertarian fringe, there is a total and unanimous agreement that marriage is not a contract whose terms can be set freely, but rather an institution that is entered voluntarily, but whose terms are dictated (and can be changed at any subsequent time) by the state.”

If true, this is a new thing. In the past the terms were dictated by the church. I doubt you will find unanimous agreement today that the views of the church are irrelevant to marriage. So perhaps the total and unanimous agreement is something not quite so total, that can change more than this implies.

“Therefore, when I hear a libertarian argument applied to marriage, I conclude that there are only two possibilities:”

This seems to be a failure of imagination. How about number 3: they are an honest libertarian who thinks that a marriage contract should be a contract like any other, AND that there are certain rights that are not alienable through contract.

danlucraft 11 Dec 2012 22:17 UTC
1 point
on: Group rationality diary, 12/10/12
Trying to do something everyday that is useful or cool enough to tell people about (at work). There are obvious visibility arguments for doing this but I’ve also found it a great motivator. Asking “who cares?” seems to cut through a lot of prioritisation fuzz. (Only 11 workdays in so far.)

danlucraft 30 May 2012 7:41 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jsalvatier’s comment on: Share Your Checklists!
It apparently stops them getting clogged with fat. You follow the bleach with a kettle of boiling water as well, I forgot to add.

danlucraft 29 May 2012 11:34 UTC
7 points
on: Share Your Checklists!
On each day that the clocks go forward or backward:
- change my master passwords
- pour a carton of bleach down the external drains

danlucraft 29 May 2012 11:15 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Learn A New Language!
So, the plan is: invest 1000 hours now, so that when you actually need to learn a language you only have to invest 800 hours then?

Anyway, I hear you saying that you have intrinsic motivation here, so these kind of calculations aren’t really relevant to you, which I understand.

danlucraft 21 May 2012 9:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Learn A New Language!
I can’t say I will never live in a non-English speaking place, but since I have no particular plans to at the moment, I have no reason to learn any particular language out of hundreds, either.

danlucraft 15 Apr 2012 9:24 UTC
7 points
on: Humans are not automatically strategic
Perhaps the only way to train yourself to achieve long-term goals is to use short-term motivation to improve your automatic behaviours, instead of trying to train ourselves to have motivational systems that work on long-term multi-step plans.

What if we broke down the action steps of your algorithm into:
- ask yourself what kind of person achieves goals like this by habit
- ask yourself how you could change yourself into that kind of person, perhaps by establishing new habits
- evaluate whether your new habits are effectively causing you to do things that work towards your goal.
So, forget about long-term plans. Instead select and implement short-term plans that:
- incrementally improve your position, so more opportunities that you can act on occur.
- change bad habits into more goal-directed habits
- put you into situations where you are likely to take actions that further your goals, automatically
- increase your intrinsic enjoyment of things that are directed towards your goals
So, for example, starting a startup is less Step 1 of a Grand Plan to become a millionaire, and more a way to put yourself in a situation where you will have to do things that you think help towards becoming a millionaire, and will change you into more the kind of person who does things that make you a millionaire.

Of course, this whole thing is just one big long-term plan after all :) But it’s a more specific one.

danlucraft 11 Apr 2012 16:41 UTC
0 points
on: Zombies: The Movie
Cylons

danlucraft 19 Mar 2012 17:42 UTC
4 points
on: Torture vs. Dust Specks
People who choose torture, if the question was instead framed as the following would you still choose torture?

“Assuming you know your lifespan will be at least 3^^^3 days, would you choose to experience 50 years worth of torture, inflicted a day at a time at intervals spread evenly across your life span starting tomorrow, or one dust speck a day for the next 3^^^3 days of your life?”

danlucraft 15 Mar 2012 14:25 UTC
7 points
on: Meta Addiction
This year I’ve quadrupled the amount of structured meta thinking I do, compared to last year, and I have seen a big improvement in my ability to make and stick to goals. So I think more meta-thinking can help you get more done, if you have a problem with sticking to resolutions, as I do. Probably the meta-thinking has to have a point to it, though.

But I’ve also been amused at just how much meta-thinking it takes for me to achieve a goal. Like, currently, achieving brushing my teeth more would take hours and hours of thinking about brushing my teeth, considering adopting the goal of brushing my teeth more, motivating myself to brush more, expressing “brushing more” as a pithy phrase, tracking my brushing daily, reviewing my brushing track record weekly etc etc.

So, in future I’d definitely like to reduce the ratio of meta-thinking to goal-achieving, by a lot, but still, I’m getting more done with more meta-thinking at the moment.

Edit: come to think of it, I could stand to brush my teeth more.

danlucraft 11 Feb 2012 10:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination
Thanks.