EniScien

Karma: 209

I grew up in Russia, not in Silicon Valley, so I didn’t know the other “people in our cluster”, and unfortunately I didn’t like to read, so I’m not familiar with many of the obvious background facts. 5 years ago I read HPMoR, but unfortunately not sequences, I read them only a couple of years ago and then only the part that was translated into Russian, in English I could not read fluently enough, but then I noticed that Google Translate began to cope with a much better translation than before, and in most cases produces a readable text from English into Russian, so that I could finally read the “Sequences” to the end and generally begin to read and write in Lesswrong.

Now I write here in “Short Forms” any thoughts that I have not seen anyone else express, but since I have not read many books, many concepts are probably expressed somewhere else by someone before me, I just do not saw, in that case it would be desirable to add a link there in the comments. Unfortunately, I have many thoughts that I wrote down even before lessvrong, but rather than re-reading and editing them, it’s easier for me to write again, so many such thoughts lie unpublished, and since even at least I wrote down my thoughts far from births, then even more of them are not even recorded anywhere except in my head, however, again, if I stumble upon them again, I will try to write them down and publish them.

EniScien 14 Feb 2024 7:58 UTC
1 point
0
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I saw that a lot of people are confused by “what does Yudkowsky mean by this difference between deep causes and surface analogies?”. I didn’t have this problem, with no delay I had interpretation what he means.
I thought that it’s difference between deep and surface regarding to black box metaphor. Difference between searching correlation between similar inputs and outputs and building a structure of hidden nodes and checking the predictions with rewarding correct ones and dividing that all by complexity of internal structure.
Difference between making step from inputs to outputs and having a model. Looking only at visible things and thinking about invisible ones. Looking only at experiment results and building theories from that.
Just like difference between deep neural networks and neural networks with no hidden layers, the first ones are much more powerful.
I am really unsure that it is right, because if it was so, why he just didn’t say that? But I write it here just in case.

EniScien 11 Jan 2024 11:48 UTC
−1 points
0
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I noticed that some names here have really bad connotations (although I am not saying that I know which don’t, or even that any hasn’t).

“LessWrong” looks like “be wrong more rare” and one of obvious ways to it is to avoid difficult things, “be less wrong” is not a way to reach any difficult goal. (Even if different people have different goals)

“Rationality: from A to Z” even worse, it looks like “complete professional guide about rationality” instead of “incomplete basic notes about a small piece of rationality weakly understood by one autodidact” which it actually is.

EniScien 26 Dec 2023 12:46 UTC
3 points
0
on: EniScien’s Shortform
There are no common words upvote/downvote in Russian, so I just said like/dislike. And it was really a mistake, these are two really different types of positive/negative marks, agree/disagree is third type and there may be any amount of other types. But I named it like/dislike, so I so thought about it like it means your power of liking it in form of outcome to author, not just adjusting the sorting like “do I want to see more posts like that higher in suggestions”.

And actually it looks for me like a more general tendency in my behaviour to avoid finding subtle differences between thing and, especially, terms. Probably, I’ve seen like people are trying to find difference in colloquial terms which are not strictly determined and next argue to that difference, I was annoyed by that and that annoyance forced me to avoid finding subtle differences in terms. Or maybe it is because they said us that synonyms are words with the same meaning, instead of near meanings (or “equal or near meanings”), and didn’t show us that there is difference in connotations. Or maybe the first was because of the second. Or maybe it was because I too much used programming languages instead of normal languages when I was only 8. Anyway, I probably need now to start developing a ²⁴⁄₇ automatically working habit to search and notice subtle differences.

EniScien 3 Jun 2023 15:33 UTC
1 point
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on: EniScien’s Shortform
Does the LessWrong site use a password strength check like the one Yudkowsky talks about (I don’t remember that one)? And if not, why not? It doesn’t seem particularly difficult to hook this up to a dictionary or something. Or is it not considered worth implementing because there’s Google registration?

EniScien 3 Jun 2023 15:06 UTC
1 point
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on: EniScien’s Shortform
Hmm. Judging from the brief view, it feels like I’m the only one who included reactions in my brief forms. I wonder why?

EniScien 3 Jun 2023 15:03 UTC
1 point
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on: EniScien’s Shortform
It occurred to me that on LessWrong there doesn’t seem to be a division of posts in evaluations into those that you want to promote as relevant right now, and those that you think will be useful over the years. If there was such an evaluation… Or such a response, then you could take a list not of karma posts, which would include those that were only needed sometime in a particular moment, but a list of those that people find useful beyond time.

That is, a short-term post might be well-written, really required for discussion at the time, rather than just reporting news, so there would be no reason to lower its karma, but it would be immediately obvious that it was not something that should be kept forever. In some ways, introducing such a system would make things easier with Best Of. And I also remember when choosing which of the sequences to include in the book, there were a number of grades on scales other than karma. This could also be added as reactions, so that such scores could be left in an independent mode.

EniScien 31 May 2023 10:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniScien’s Shortform
A. I saw a post that reactions were added. I was just thinking that this would be very helpful and might solve my problem. Included them for my short forms. I hope people don’t just vote no more without asking why through reactions.

EniScien 26 May 2023 16:17 UTC
1 point
on: EniScien’s Shortform
On the one hand, I really like that on LessWrong, unlike other platforms, everything unproductive is downgraded in the rating. But on the other hand, when you try to publish something yourself, it looks like a hell of a black box, which gives out positive and negative reinforcements for no reason at all.

This completely chaotic reward system seems to be bad for my tendency to post anything at all on LessWrong, just in the last few weeks that I’ve been using EverNote, it has counted 400 posts, and by a quick count, I have about 1500 posts lying in Google Keep , at the same time, on LessWrong I have published only about 70 over the past year, that is, this is 6-20 times less, although according to EverNote estimates ~ 97% of these notes belong to the “thoughts” category, and not to something like lists shopping.

I tried literally following the one advice given to me here and treating any scores less than ±5 as noise, but that didn’t negate the effect. I don’t even know, maybe if the ratings of the best posts here don’t match up with my rating of my best posts, I should post a couple of really terrible posts to make sure they get rated extremely bad and not good or not?

EniScien 26 May 2023 15:20 UTC
−3 points
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I must say, I wonder why I did not see here speed reading and visual thinking as one of the most important tips for practical rationality, that is, a visual image is 2 + 1 d, and an auditory image is 0 + 1 d, plus auditory images use sequential thinking, in which people are very bad, and visual thinking is parallel. And according to Wikipedia, the transition from voice to visual reading should speed you up 5 (!) times, and in the same way, visual thinking should be 5 times faster compared to voice, and if you can read and think 5 times in a lifetime more thoughts, it’s just an incredible difference in productivity.

Well, the same applies to the use of visual imagination instead of voice, here you can also use pictures. (I don’t know, maybe it was all in Korzybski’s books and my problem is that I didn’t read them, although I definitely should have done this?)

EniScien 8 May 2023 6:21 UTC
1 point
on: EniScien’s Shortform
Yudkowsky says that public morality should be derived from personal morality, and that personal morality is paramount. But I don’t think this is the right way to put it, in my view morality is the social relationships that game theory talks about, how not to play games with a negative sum, how to achieve the maximum sum for all participants.

And morality is independent of values, or rather, each value system has its own morality, or even more accurately, morality can work even if you have different value systems. Morality is primarily about questions of justice, sometimes all sorts of superfluous things like god worship are dragged under this kind of human sentiment, so morality and justice may not be exactly equivalent.

And game theory and answers questions about how to achieve justice. Also, justice may concern you as directly one of your values, and then you won’t betray even in a one-time prisoner’s dilemma without penalty. Or it may not bother you and then you will pass on always when you do not expect to be punished for it.

In other words, morality is universal between value systems, but it cannot be independent of them. It makes no sense to forbid someone to be hurt if he has absolutely nothing against being hurt.

In other words, I mean that adherence to morality just feels different from inside than conformity to your values, the former feels like an obligation and the latter feels like a desire, in one case you say “should” and in the other “wants.”

I’ve read “Sorting Pebbles into Different Piles” several times and never understood what it was about until it was explained to me. Certainly the sorters aren’t arguing about morality, but that’s because they’re not arguing about game theory, they’re arguing about fun theory… Or more accurately not really, they are pure consequentialists after all, they don’t care about fun or their lives, only piles into external reality, so it’s theory of value, but not theory of fun, but theory of prime.

But in any case, I think people might well argue with them about morality. If people can sell primes to sorters and they can sell hedons to people, would it be moral to betray in a prisoner’s dilemma and get 2 primes by giving −3 hedons. And most likely they will come to the conclusion that no, that would be wrong, even if it is just (“prime”).

That you shouldn’t kill people, even if you can get yourself the primeons you so desire, and they shouldn’t destroy the right piles, even if they get pleasure from looking at the blowing pebbles.

EniScien 8 May 2023 4:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: EniScien’s Shortform
I added link to comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence

EniScien 8 May 2023 2:14 UTC
17 points
0
on: EniScien’s Shortform
In HPMOR, Draco Malfoy thinks that either Harry Potter was lucky enough to be able to come up with a bunch of great ideas in a short period of time, or he, for some unimaginable reason, has already spent a bunch of time thinking about how to do it. The real answer to this false dilemma is that Harry just read a book as a kid where its author came up with all these for the book’s needs.

In How to Seem (and Be) Deep Thought, Eliezer Yudkowsky says that the Japanese often portray Christians as bearers of incredible wisdom, while the opposite is true of the “eastern sage” archetype in the western midst. And the real answer is that both cultures have vastly different, yet meaningful sets of multiple ideas, so when one person meets another, and he immediately throws at him 3 meaningful and highly plausible thoughts that the first person has never even heard of, and then does so again and again, the first person concludes that he is a genius.

I’ve also seen a number of books and fanfics whose authors seemed like incredible writing talents and whose characters seemed like geniuses, fountaining so many brilliant ideas. And then each time it turned out that they really just came from a cultural background that was unfamiliar to me. And I generalized this to the point that when you meet someone who spouts a bunch of brilliant ideas in a row, you should conclude that it’s almost certainly not that he’s a genius, but that he’s familiar with a meme you’re unfamiliar with.

And hmmm. Just now I thought about it, but it probably also explains that Aura of Power around characters who are familiar with a certain medium, and people who are familiar with a certain profession (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zbSsSwEfdEuaqCRmz/eniscien-s-shortform?commentId=dMxfcMMteKqM33zSa), that’s probably the point, and it means that the feeling is not false, it really elevates above mere mortals, because you have a whole bunch of meaningful thoughts that mere mortals simply do not have.

When the familiar with more memeplexes will ponder, he will stand on a bigger pile of cached thoughts, not just on the shoulders of giants, not on the shoulders of a human pyramid of human giants, so he can see much further than someone who looks only from his, no matter how big or small, height.

EniScien 3 May 2023 18:29 UTC
3 points
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I’ve read, including on lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence), that often listening to those who failed is more useful than those who succeeded, but I somehow missed if there was an explanation somewhere as to why? And the fact is that there are 1000 ways to be wrong and only 1 way to do something right, so if you listen to a story about success, it should be 1000 times longer than a story about failure, because for the latter it is enough to make one fatal mistake, while for the former you have to not make the whole thousand.

However, in practice, stories of failure and stories of success are likely to be about the same length, since people will take note of about the same number of factors. In the end, you will still have to read 1,000 stories each, whether success or failure, except that success happens 1,000 times less often and the stories about it will be just as short.

EniScien 1 May 2023 18:39 UTC
2 points
0
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I haven’t encountered this technique anywhere else, so I started using it based on how associations work in the brain:

If I can’t remember a word, instead of just continuing to tell myself “think, think, think,” I start going through the letters alphabetically and make an effort over each one “what are the words for that letter, is that word by any chance?” And that almost always helps.

EniScien 1 May 2023 16:26 UTC
1 point
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I’ve noticed that in everyday life, when you’re testing some habit choices to see if they’re working for you, it’s better to leave a habit that doesn’t seem to be working for you, to make it easier to determine that, because otherwise you won’t be sure later if it turned out to work otherwise, habit one or habit two or habit three.

This reminds me of how I used to do mod compilations, it might seem like a good idea to add all the desired ones at once, but then if some mod is missing or some extra, you won’t be able to figure out which one. So they should only be added and removed one at a time.

With habits the same, only even more difficult, because they begin to act gradually and do it much slower, and then there are factors beyond your control. And I used to assume that it doesn’t make sense to waste time and effort on following useless habits.

However, since it is also experimentation, it was worth bearing in mind that any change would in any case complicate the analysis of what worked, it is better to keep them until you find a stable working combination, and then remove them one at a time, too, in case certain habits somehow worked only together.

EniScien 1 May 2023 15:19 UTC
1 point
on: EniScien’s Shortform
Yudkowsky says in one of his posts that since 0 and 1 for probabilities mean -∞ and +∞, you can’t just add up all the hypotheses to get one. However, I don’t see why this should necessarily follow. After all, to select one hypothesis from the hypothesis space, we must get the number of bits of evidence corresponding to the program complexity of that hypothesis.

And accordingly we don’t need to have an infinite number of proofs to choose, as many as the number of bits in the longest hypothesis is sufficient, since any longer hypotheses will compete with shorter hypotheses not for correctness but for accuracy.

Yes, in the end you can never reach a probability of 1 because you have meta level uncertainty, but that is exactly what meta level probability is, and it should have been written as a separate multiplier, because otherwise adding an infinite number of uncertain meta levels will give you a probability of 0 for each of your hypotheses.

And the probability P(H) without considering meta levels should never be 0 or 1, but the probability P(H|O) could well be, since the entire meta level is put into P(O) and therefore P(H|O) will have a known finite program complexity. That is, something like:

A=”first bit is zero”, B=”first bit is one”

C=”A or B is true”, O=”other a priori”

P(O)=~0.99

P(A|O)=1/2, P(B|O)=1/2

P(C|O)=P(A|O)+P(B|O)=1/2+1/2=(1+1/2)=1

P(C)=P(C|O)*P(O)=1*0.99=0.99

And if we talk about the second bit, there will be two more hypotheses orthogonal to the first two, on the third bit two more hypotheses, and if we talk about the first three bits, there will already be a choice of 8 multiplications of the first six hypotheses, and there will no longer be correct to ask which of 6 hypotheses is true, because there are 6, in options 8, and must be true simultaneously not one hypothesis, but at least 3.

And accordingly, for 8 hypotheses, we can also add up the probabilities as 8 times ¹⁄₈ and end up with 1. Or we can write it as 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/8=1, but of course this is only possible if we can count the number of bits in the hypotheses, decompose them into these bits and determine the intersections, so as not to count the same bits repeatedly.

EniScien 29 Apr 2023 12:28 UTC
−1 points
on: EniScien’s Shortform
For some reason until recently, nowhere I heard about programming did it explain that object-oriented programming is essentially a reverse projection of the human brain, everywhere I heard about programming before it said something like, at best, that procedural programming is ugh and object-oriented is cool, it did not explain that procedural programming is much closer to the language that reality thinks in, and inventing “objects” is just a crutch for the imperfect monkey brain

All this came to my mind when I noticed that people tend to think of drugs as if a drug is an object that has the property of “curing”, like a potion in a video game or a real “potion” from antiquity. And people are still extremely prone to think about viruses, bacteria, antibiotics, vaccines, and the like in this way. Not to imagine a specific mechanism for how it’s supposed to work, but just to assume that the drug as a whole will “cure.” And of course the same goes for poisons, people not familiar with biology think of them as having an inherent property to “poison,” or on a deeper level, acids, as having an inherent property to “dissolve.

And if you go back to the question of reverse projection of the human mind, it becomes obvious that human language is not something that came out of nowhere, it is a product of the human brain, so language must also be a projection of its structure, and therefore you need reverse projection as objects in a broader sense, so specifically convolutional neural networks here, to work with it properly.

EniScien 29 Apr 2023 12:26 UTC
1 point
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: EniScien’s Shortform
Or, if I haven’t written it down anywhere else, it occurred to me that since we live inside the Tegmark mathematical universe, in which case the universe is just a giant formula and the process of solving it step by step, each next part after the equal sign is the next moment in time, and the value of the expression itself, what is stored between the equal signs, is energy. The superposition is the subtraction inside the parentheses, which with each step adds another multiplier to both parts of the difference, and the different Everett branches are the same two halves of each difference, just with the parentheses open.

Well, now it’s not that I think this is wrong, but rather the opposite, too obvious, and therefore useless.

Besides, it can also be presented in another form, in terms of the intersection of computer science and quantum mechanics, the universe, or rather, all universes in mathematics, is a bit string, which diverges into Everett branches, in the first sign you have 2 branches for 0 and 1, in the second you already have 4, in the third 8 and so on, each branch is a standard particular bit string, with each branch division the amount of information in this string grows, that is, entropy grows, and this direction of entropy growth in each individual branch is time.

The law of conservation of energy, or even more broadly the law of conservation, common to all mathematics, is that at each step you have for 0 you have 1 and vice versa, each time you divide this into two bit options and each time you have the opposite option, so the total entropy of all mathematics is also in some way zero, if you look from inside it is infinite, but to write this down, you do not need any length formula, zero length is enough for you.

So from the inside mathematics is infinite, but from the outside it adds up to zero. That’s sort of the answer to the question “why is there something and not nothing?” and that answer is that “something” refers to a piece of “everything” and “everything” is what nothing looks like from the inside.

I came up with this myself, but later I also saw someone else’s formulation of this, that for every number on the mathematical plane there is an inverse number, so even though the math has infinite information, it adds up to zero in the end, hence the law of conservation of energy.

As far as I know, it is widely known among physicists, as opposed to ordinary people, that energy is a conditional quantity, and the energy of a part of a system can be the energy of the whole system, since energy can also be negative, can be as negative as you want, so what we think of as zero is only a convenient point of reference.

EniScien 29 Apr 2023 12:22 UTC
−1 points
on: EniScien’s Shortform
I was once very interested in the question of what “time” is and what “entropy” is. The thing is, I watched popular science videos on YouTube, and nowhere was there a normal answer, at best it was some kind of circular argumentation. Also, nowhere was there a normal explanation of what entropy was, only vaguely stating that it was a “measure of disorder in the system”.

In my head, however, the idea swirled around that it had something to do with the fact that there are more directions outward than inward in space. And I also twirled that it must be connected with the law of least action, for which I also did not meet such an explanation, that is, that the reason is that the straight path is one path, and there are at least 4 detours, and this is only the closest, with each step there will be 2 times less, respectively, if we imagine that there is no “law” of least action, we will still see it, because for a particle the probability to be in each next step from the central path will be 2 times less, because there are twice as many paths, and for a wave it will not even be probability, but purely its distribution.

All these thoughts were inspired to me by a video of balls falling down a pyramid of pegs, and they end up having paths on both sides inward at each step, and only one side path outward, and they form a normal distribution. That is, to put it another way, the point is that although the number of points is the same, the paths in the center converge to each other and the paths on the edges do not, the two paths in the center form a single cluster of central paths and the two paths on the edges do not.

And from this we can assume that the average expected space will have a shape close to a square, a cube, a tesseract, or another figure with equal sides, because although there is only one such figure, and many other variants, these variants do not fit together, but variants close to a cube fit into a cube.

This also explains for me why Everett’s chaotic branches do not create a chaotic world. There are more chaotic branches, but they form a circle around the edge rather than a circle in the center, the least chaotic branches are fewer, but they converge to a world close to order, but the most chaotic branches differ from each other even more than they differ from order.

Somewhere here on lasswrong I saw a question about why, if we live in a Tegmark universe, we don’t see constant violations of the laws of physics, like “clothes turn into crocodiles.” However… We do observe. But only “clothes” and “crocodile” are too meaningfully human variants, in fact there are much more, one mole of matter contains ~10^23 particles, and even if we only assume different variants of their presence/absence, it is 2⁽¹⁰23), our system is too big to notice these artifacts, however if we go to individual particles...

That’s exactly what we’ll see, constant random fluctuations. Quantum. This can be considered a successful prediction of Tegmark, although in fact only retrospective.

EniScien 27 Apr 2023 10:59 UTC
1 point
on: Why don’t 4 lottery wins prove information from a higher power?
Now I have a better understanding and now I can formulate that it does not take into account the possibility that the report of four victories may be false, that the lotteries could be dishonest, that the woman could simply hack the mechanism of pseudo-randomness, and also does not take into account a priori information in the form of that there are 8 billion people on Earth, and there have been many lotteries throughout history, so the probability that at least someone wins 4 lotteries is very different from the probability of winning a particular woman, in addition, even though she won in a row, and not for a lifetime, you should also take into account the total number of attempts to play the lottery, because the probability of 4 wins in a row is very different if you played 4 times or 400 times, finally, in general, the a priori probability of violating the laws of physics or mathematics, in general, any supernatural strength is extremely low, since these models have a huge amount of evidence for and new evidence will need to overcome all their mass, so the choice will very slowly reach the hypothesis of violation in the laws of the lower level, even if we cannot find an explanation for this event, and finally even if we decide that there is something supernatural here, then there are a lot of options here, it is far from necessarily God, and even more so not necessarily Christian, each of these two hypotheses will have to be proved separately from the presence of supernatural.