EniScien

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 11:10 PM

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  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a residue of your internal monolog, and those signals can be measured objectively.

  I’ve heard about that and that looked like an evidence that you are able to untrain only things which are introspectively visible, not that it is somewhat important. Again, what about deaf-mute, what do they subvocalize? And “a bit faster”? 5000 phonemes/​min, ~100/​s, more looks like 1 phoneme per neuron activation. I doubt you can properly understand speech on 1000wpm.

  But in general, when I started, I failed to find existing discourse and decided that it will be quicker to just check. And than it just looked too clear than I actually can at least think just visually and much, much faster than speak.

  I’ll check the link though. (It’s existence explains why not more people checking this)

  PS Edit: okay, I’ve read and I didn’t find anything new in this article. I will try to read link on “evidence”

  And also just to check, will you also say that it’s impossible for ordinary human to read text and speak at the same time?

  PPS Edit: and no, second article also hasn’t had any evidence. But still thanks, I’ve found some techniques of speed reading I’ve never heard before, only thought about by myself, so probably my ideas aren’t new even if it’s not something like math. And people converge in such topics, and end up having almost fully overlapping ideas, and I’m not exception.

  And the reason why such ideas aren’t widely used probably isn’t that no one discovered that, but because people are sceptical. Like I was. 1000wpm? 20000wpm? Looks like fake for credulous.

  But now I’m less sceptical even about such results because I was wrongly sceptical about such things like training of imagination, attention, intelligence, memory and willpower. And was clearly wrong. Btw, what you will say about these things?

  Also I was sceptical about thinking multiple thoughts in parallel, but that was mostly because of Feynman’s and EY’s claim, and now I’m just more doubt them, after I understood it’s easily possible.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 10:20 PM

  1 point

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Do someone know something like “synesthesia” browser extension for better legibility? It should paint black-and-white letters into colored, probably saving intensity.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 10:03 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  But it depends which speed do you read? If it’s 800-1000wpm (4000-5000 letter/​min), then I maybe wrong.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 9:44 PM

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  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Some apriori reasoning like: pronoucing goes a consequences, one token at time, but brain is 200Hz is consequence, brain is better in being parallel with all these 80M neurons, and also words have meaning as a whole, so most of step by step letters don’t even contain meaning.

  And next evidence from experience to this apriori reasoning: when I succeed to stop pronouncing I can see and understand three words at a moment. Also I wrote whole shortpost here about my experience with trying to replace usual speech into visual thinking. (you need “visual thinking” section)

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 8:46 PM

  7 points

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  in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Ar­bital has been im­ported to LessWrong

  IIRC you are wrong, lenses are just different ways to see the page of same topic. They’re also used for “version ML programmers”, “version for DT professors”, “version for usual people”. Or for Wikipedia it would be “scientifically precise encyclopedia” and “quickly get useful info about topic for usual person”.

  Edit: oh, also, as I know, lenses are from tvtropes (caution: addictive memetic hazard)

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 8:29 PM

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  on: Ar­bital has been im­ported to LessWrong

  Very cool. I probably already for two years wondered why to have Arbital as additional site instead of doing it on LW. And that would be very good if now I will be able to read it without bugs and even make edits (easily, by three clicks!). I also like that there are tabs instead of “lenses”, I’ve always thought that “lense” is improper idea if it can show you completely different set of contents.

  Also I for a long time thought that it would be good to post Sequences, HPMoR and some other things as wiki pages, they are too crucial for LW to their edits be vetoed as personal blog pages. And also post into them their translations to other languages, so you can read them on LW with all it’s functions, in the same place with all the other content (I for a long wasn’t on LW because I read Sequences as fb2 translations). And you could add and edit translations in wiki way.

  And also probably write one sentence (speaking) names and one paragraph summaries, so you could get quick understanding of Sequences better than “highlights”. And probably also figure out which points of sequences are the most important to be convinced in the beginning vs just knowing that it’s community opinion.

  And probably also find a way to know in advance which point will be more and less obvious for me. Eg Pebble Sorters were completely obvious for me, probably can be checked by Orthogonality Thesis, but Truly Part of You was very unobvious to me and I suspect it’s a question of generation. And some points already were in HPMoR, and other people could read planecrash before Sequences or Feynman, GEB, Kahneman.

  And just to not forget to say it: I for a long wanted to add spaced repetition reminders for reading posts, otherwise I forget them and forget that I forgot.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 5:02 PM

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  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  (There was some errors, message hadn’t sent before now)

  Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not “just easy”? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it’s like finding details of how you are moving.

  (Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it’s actually hard to from the first try read/​remember even single time new long words like “cefoperazone” and “ceftazidime” and that wasn’t just a trope)

  99.9%??? Are you serious? I thought I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I will forget more than 70% of what I read THE NEXT DAY. Like, I can remember which tweets and shortforms I’ve read in the last few days, just trying to remember what I read, not because I found myself in relevant situation.

  And that is for random post which I didn’t considered important to me like “what to do with AI for a layman?”. I remember much better posts which I did considered important, like the one LW about effectively explaining things in the way of “it’s like airbnb, but for boats”.

  I think about it in the way of “which time I can spare if I will find something really important”, it’s not like now I am going and saying “oh, again I have no idea what to do with my time”. It’s just that I am not compelled to work, don’t have kids etc.

  I don’t think about it quite that way. Isn’t the sense in sharing ideas? You have have ideas, some are more important, and share them is easier than invent and different people find different ideas. So you have a benefit from sharing with each other. So if it was like that I’d expected more like 30K of people showing with great ideas on lesswrong once a week each.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 5:01 PM

  1 point

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  The most useful my ideas to write in details:

  • Thinking is the most powerful human ability which differ us from animals

  • You can develop any aspect of your brain/​thinking/​neurons by training

    • You don’t need to be restricted by existing ones, you can invent them

  • You can develop your thinking and next invent by it better ways to develop thinking

  • Introspection is really important, because it’s really hard to develop thinking blindly

  • Ordinary processes of learning are INCREDIBLY ineffective, you can do better

    • eg, anki, pomodoro timed learning, remembering images, not words

  • You train things in imagination

  • You can remember things better by imagining what you need to remember in which situation

  • Optimisation of internal dialogue and visual thinking

  • Moving your attention from mental things instead of fading them for better remembering

  TBC

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 4:49 PM

  1 point

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Whole my life I hated reading. Now I have a better understanding why and what to do with that.

  I read slow because I am pronouncing things, I pronounce things because I want to have emotions from intonations, I need that because I don’t imagine a lot. And as a bonus I am pronouncing things, not just perceiving audibly, so reading for me is an effort, in comparison with listening.

  Unfortunately pronouncing also is a very stable habit, it’s really hard to not pronounce things. I will try to use rhythms for speed reading.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 4:44 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  My knowledge state

  Read books: HPMoR x7, Sequences x3, planecrash x2, “You’re joking Mr Feynman” x3, GEB ¹⁄₄, Fast and Slow Thinking ¹⁄₃

  Didn’t read: all the other rationalist books. And just almost no books, probably the one I can remember is Better Angels of Our Nature.

  Have read some Wikipedia pages.

  Have 99.9%, 110K words on Russian on https://​​myvocab.info

  Watched a lot of popular science YouTube videos and lectures, mostly sciences, almost no the most useful ones like evolutionary/​behavioral/​cognitive psychology, neurobiology, information theory, probability, game theory, DT, or economics and programming, or at least physics, math and human biology. Almost fully illiterate in history, don’t know anything except school course (and even my teacher said that schoolbooks we must use are very poor schoolbooks, probably it’s Russian specifics). Have at least decent basic biology knowledge, I don’t feel like our bodies are squashy but can regenerate because of vital power. Have sort of wide, but unrigorous and non-deep knowledge. Can’t derive wave function of atom of hydrogen.

  Read really little of fiction, mostly fanfiction, mostly fantasy, almost no sci-fi.

  Have done some thinking in intuitive math on topics like connection between 1+i, Pyfagors theorem and level of curve of our space.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 3:58 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  TLDR

  From Russia, hated reading, was grateful to science, liked clever things, cheats, computers, coded since 9y, was going to become a programmer, read HPMoR at 12, but didn’t tried to solve any riddle, didn’t read sequences until 16y, until 2023 didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. Now trying to generate maximally useful thoughts, post some on LW.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 3:54 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Current Detailed

  I am from Russia. I liked to watch Discovery and other scientific channels from an age of ~7. I never liked to read, only listened sometimes, and when I have gone into school, I understood that books lied, we didn’t have nicks, bullies, D-graders or A-graders (I got some As, but Bs too, and no one got only As), there were no any correlation between being a good student, wearing glasses, liking reading and playing chess.

  When I was 9 I learned some programming, I decided that I will work as a programmer when I grew up, because programmers do have really good salaries, can work from any point of the world with internet, and don’t need to show a diploma, just their skills, so I will not need to go to university, so I will not need to go into last two classes of school, I will just need to practice my skills for next ~7 years. Also it was work with computers and I really liked computers.

  When I was 12 I found comment “it’s not excellent fic, it’s average, excellent is HP and Methods of Rationality”. My favourite fictional universe + rationality?? And such characteristic… It even costed to read it, even if it didn’t have an audiobook yet. And author was so dear that he said where actually you should drop it if you still don’t interested. It said wait until 10th chapter where it starts to be really cool.

  But for me it was really cool from the first sentence. I was so interested in reading that one time I almost was late to school (which I never did even closely before). When I ended reading I decided that I will reread this precious treasure for whole my life, so it’s better to reread it only once in few year, so it will not become boring, which would be awful, because I’ve never seen any book even close to that ever before.

  In the end there were said “it’s only shadow of Sequences”. I’ve “Fable of Science and Politics”. And it was not even close that good. So I decided that I will check them all eventually. But not now. I’ve read them only when was 16y and really regretted that it “only shadow” instead of “how to know everything HJPEV knows and even more”. I’ve all the sequences which were translated on Russian (a lot of even R: AZ weren’t). They changed my worldview. But I didn’t know English. And for a long time idea of reading through translator didn’t come into my mind.

  Until 2023 I didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. I was trying to know all the truths to act out of them. I wasn’t trying to act by skills of performing such strategies which get maximum expected_utility according to correct models of my preferences and world around me. THAT was moment everything actually changed, not just worldview. In short terms I’ve started search for creative ideas for enhancing my everyday life, learned how to fully turn off any unwanted emotions (and just as a consequence removed 2-3 fears which were with me for whole my life), learned how to control my thoughts, enhanced my imagination, lifted up my mood, started to invent mental techniques.

  Unfortunately I still had a lot of developed psychological blocks, which resisted to thinking about them to fix them. And one of them was making detailed plans for short term and short term future. I fixed this problem in the end. But I still have a lot of issues with motivation.

  Now I have a lot of ideas to post on LW, which are probably significantly useful.

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 3:53 PM

  1 point

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  EniScien’s Bio thread

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 3:22 PM

  2 points

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Optimising internal dialogue

  Never repeating thoughts technique

  In planecrash EY shows technique of “never repeating same thoughts”. And it can look useful, like what if you was repeating your thoughts for 10 times? You could get 10x more thoughts by that. Sort of like if you had 10 times more time for thinking, which looks really useful.

  But when I actually started to practice it, I noticed, that actually a lot of time I spend on replacing last word by better synonym, a lot of time I rephrase the end of sentence, or whole sentence, or whole paragraph. That I spend a lot of time trying to think up better words to say.

  And the same thoughts… I repeated them not just 10 times for whole time. I repeated a lot of them hundreds times per DAY.

  A lot of time I wanted to start new thought and I for a long time (~4/​5) explained circumstances, next premises, arguments etc. Like if I was doing that in speech. Because my internal dialogue felt like speech, it wasn’t really different that it was in my imagination, not in real world.

  So if somebody will say that Yudkowsky thinks 1000 times faster, I can easily believe in that, at least for myself in the span of days. And I can’t even compare in the span of weeks.

  But never repeating same thoughts is only one technique of optimising your internal dialogue.

  I used a lot phrases which were not actually meaningful in thoughts, only in speech. And these probably were ²⁄₃ of my internal dialogues.

  I was trying not to use abbreviations, slang etc, and of course not refer to half of ideas like “because of that” if it was something in my visual imagination, or some knowledge I am sure in. I was trying to make my internal speech sound properly in grammatical and rhetorical sense, instead of being maximally compressed.

  I was trying to speak only language that I know, Russian or English. Not to mix Russian and English sentences, and even mix words inside of sentences using Russian, English, German, Italian, Esperanto, Japanese, Latin, Greek and some languages that I know a little.

  I was not replacing long words and phrases in my speech by imagining of how they will write. And also wasn’t doing the same for math formulas and code. And geometrical blueprints. And schemes. And full visual images or even collages of them.

  I was trying to speak legibly, and not in maximal possible speed, but in speed on which people in real dialogues didn’t start to complain that I speak too fast. Which by itself could make my internal dialogue 2-3 times slower.

  I was trying to make my internal speech more precise by sending a little tension on my speaking muscles, instead of just doing it fully in imagination. And… Actually my muscles very much slower than my imagination, it by itself was doing my speech 3-4 times slower.

  Visual thinking

  But even if I will replace all my internal sentences into saying “that” and just mentally referring to idea, that also will not be the best result. As I noticed, just visual images come to my mind faster that I can say “that”, ~2 times faster.

  And just the speed is only one parameter in which visual is better than audio. Our world used to refer to video and audio as the same category of information sources. Used to say that you can be visual of audio learner.

  But consider the difference in size in video and audio files. 1 min of audio will be ~1mb, 1 min of video ~150mb, 150x (!) difference.

  Consider a page of text, it’s something like 400 words, 2000 letters + 400 spaces, how much time do you need to see a page by eyes? Something like ¹⁄₄ of second maybe. And how much time do you need to listen it as audio? At the maximum speed of human speech it will be 12 syllables, 4 words/​s, at x2 8 words, so ¹⁄₅₀, ¹⁄₁₀₀ for audio of visual. And on normal speed of speech it’s more something like ¹⁄₂₀₀, ¹⁄₄₀₀.

  There are speed reading techniques, and even Wikipedia says that it can give you 5x speed of usual reading in speed (~200wpm, speed of fast speech).

  But that is still just 20wps (1000wpm). Human reaction speed is 0.1-0.25s, and in this time yours eyes allegedly can recognise only 2-5 words?? When you are looking on picture you are not restricted by recognising only 2-5 things at the moment, you can see it as a whole.

  Though there is a problem of quality of seeing. How how much words you can see in enough quality to recognise? I used a flashlight to create a trace in my eye and next kept it at one word in the center, it looks like I can see in enough quality a square 11x11 or 13x13, 121-169 chars, by one eye, 242-338 chars by both, which could be 50-70 words.

  And it’s only for speed reading, in your mind there will be no such restrictions. 5x faster thinking by analogy with 5x faster reading via using visual track instead of audio, it’s only lower limit of possible.

  And you don’t need to restrict yourself by usual speech rules than. You can use a lot of long terms and phrases like “utility function”, because length is no longer limits your speed.

  Now there is a question, will such speech work? Shouldn’t speech be audio? I don’t think so because of deaf and unable to speak people, who can whole life use gesture language, “speak” by their hands and “hear” by their eyes.

  And I suspect that limits on visual thinking should be very high.

  Because it works in more natural to brain information processing mode. Not in consequence, but in parallel. Your brain have 200 tacts/​s max in consequence, but has 80B neurons.

  I was afraid that sentences have dependence of next from previous, so you can’t say them in parallel. But… It’s only in English and German words order is fixed. In my native Russian you can use words almost in any order, and they still will make almost the same sentence. So I think that no.

  And imagining words of sentence visually instead of audibly is only the beginning. Next you can do so much. You can use as your speech emojis and even replace words just by pictures, (again, use code and math, schemes, schemes). You can keep threads of sentences in multiple languages at the same time.

  You can see the whole sequence of your thoughts, not just current thought. You can group your thoughts into context, and remember these at one moment. You can colour your words like with synesthesia or like in IDE. You can add comments, and reactions, and marks for yourself.

  You can you eyes independently to have two tracks of flat image like on computer screen, or you can use both to have 3d! Use distance, texture as additional type of data, like colour.

  Practice

  I was somewhat incredulous to all of these thoughts. But next I tried that. And all that actually works. Some time ago I noticed that I am 2-3 times when I am using my just beginner’s visual thinking. And I can be now even more faster in learning, because in difference from acting I can learn a few things simultaneously.

  Also visual thinking actually helps a lot in navigating in thoughts, not repeating the same a lot of times, because I can just see continuation of this thought sequence.

  Problems:

  Visual thinking in my case refuses to “just work”, I need to every day start it by deliberate practice before it continues to work automatically.

  And it’s prone to gradually fall out from your mind when I am using audio instead, like when thinking by audio, or talking (much less when listening), or even writing, because I have a habit to pronounce things which I write.

  Another problems is that some days I can start using visual thinking almost right after getting up. And some other days my imagination just works worse and I struggle to start visual thinking for whole day.

  Also I was used to express emotions by mentally saying sentences by intonation and I didn’t find good alternative for that in my visual thinking.

  When I started I made a lot of mistakes in the process of training.

  Like I thought that if I will make my thoughts less loud and intonated, visual thinking will come by itself. It didn’t. My better idea was just break my internal sentences on half and wait before I will be able to notice their meaning without pronouncing.

  Something sort of like when I am trying to speak not very well known language, know what I need, but prohibit to myself to speak my native language, and next without words try to find words in another language.

  Another mistake was trying to restrict visual thinking. In saying only things that I would say audibly. Or in imagining visual thought only in subjective space. Or in making them look like usual text, instead of just visualing words in any convenient order.

  Intuition of “how it will be more convenient to do that mental action” are generally very useful to listen to, because they usually signal which mental actions will train better and faster.

  Another mistake was trying to develop visual thinking as different mode, instead of shifting every my action to it just a little.

  (That’s just short list of thoughts that come to my mind immediately, not even close to full list of ideas. And would be interested to know where do exists some similar ideas. Speed reading or Feynman’s modeling method do come to mind, but that’s only which I know.)

• EniScienFeb 20, 2025, 12:37 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Rephrased

• EniScienFeb 19, 2025, 9:39 PM

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  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  I am not sure what is unclear. But I many times noticed that my brain is very confused seeing eg EY’s recent post about Lies Told to Kids with 360 karma and comparing it some post of sequences that got “pitiful” 100+. And it looked like an example of inflation, that recent much less cool post gets a few times more karma. And I don’t know how calibrate my brain, and using some software solution looks easier.

• EniScienFeb 19, 2025, 9:14 PM

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  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  I am suspicious to and don’t like using some weird sidesteppings, instead of not being confused while looking on the question from the position of “how it will actually look in the world/​situation” (though they can be faster, yeah).

  I mean, causes are real, future was caused by you, may be say controlled, and it less feels like controlling something if somebody predicts by wishes and performs them before I can think about their fulfilling.

  But these are probably just trade-offs of trying to explain these things to people in plain English.

  When I first thought that picking actions by conditional expected utility was obviously correct, I was very confused about the whole DTs situation. So link was very useful, thanks.

• EniScienFeb 18, 2025, 8:55 PM

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  What is the Sense of writing quick takes at the same page with worse editor if next you got kicked out to fast takes page?!

• EniScienFeb 18, 2025, 8:53 PM

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  on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  I’ve just found out Inflation Adjusted Karma Sorting and started to wish it be implemented into standard karma viewing system

• EniScienFeb 18, 2025, 1:37 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: EniS­cien’s Shortform

  Update: I am certainly lost some writing skills… Or, more precisely, I can’t at the same time use my old writing skills and successfully think new thoughts, they are too distant in mental space. That makes things harder, I am not sure what to do with that.

  One of very important problems here is that my old wring skills are to tightly weaven as a habit. Do someone know solution for such problems?