I didn’t know what to expect, and this was an interesting read. What was the context for when and where it was delivered? EDIT: nm just saw the Fiction tag. Still interested in context though; I do not know who James Windrow is, except for what I can speculate on from this story.
Trevor Hill-Hand
Karma: 74
In Anthropic’s support page for “I want to opt out of my prompts and results being used for training” they say:
We will not use your Inputs or Outputs to train our models, unless: (1) your conversations are flagged for Trust & Safety review (in which case we may use or analyze them to improve our ability to detect and enforce our Usage Policy, including training models for use by our Trust and Safety team, consistent with Anthropic’s safety mission), or (2) you’ve explicitly reported the materials to us (for example via our feedback mechanisms), or (3) by otherwise explicitly opting in to training.
Notably, this doesn’t provide an opt out method, and the same messaging is repeated across similar articles/questions. The closest thing to an opt out seems to be “you have the right to request a copy of your data, and object to our usage of it”.
I see people upvoting this, and I think I can see some good insights in this post, but MAN are glowfics obnoxious to read, and this feels really hard to read in a very similar way. I’m sad it is not easier to read.
Something that may help build a better model/intuition is this video from Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAhWgkKlHI
I mentally visualize the cold air as a liquid when I open the door, or maybe picturing it looking similar to the fog from dry ice.
Since it’s cold, it falls downward, “pouring” out onto the floor, and probably does not take more than a few seconds, though I would love to see someone capture it on video with a thermal camera.
After that, I figure it doesn’t really matter how long the door is open, until you start talking about leaving it open for 10+ minutes where you can then start to worry about the food’s temperature rising, and the fridge wasting energy trying to cool the open space.
On the timescale of just a few moments while you grab stuff, the damage is already done once you open it the first time, and leaving it open or opening/closing it again doesn’t really affect anything.
This is also why grocery stores and restaurant kitchens tend to have reach-in fridges, open from the top like a chest freezer, instead of vertical doors (though, that’s also for convenience).
I don’t think it would be TOO long, I happily read through very long posts on here.
However, that said, I was curious enough to read that blog post, and that’s about the length and level of detail I expect in a normal short-to-medium size LW post, but it also stopped short of where I wanted it to. I hope that helps calibrate a little? I don’t know how “typical” I am as an example LW reader though.
Oh, and because I know it annoys me when people get distracted away from the main question by this sort of stuff, question is “Can you share the experimental results with just enough explanation to understand the methodology”, because I think everything else will flow naturally from questions about the experiment and the results.
I’ve been doing similar things with my day-to-day work like making stuff in CSS/Bootstrap or Excel, and my hobbies like mucking about in Twine or VCV Rack, and have noticed:
a similar vibe of there seems to be a “goldilocks prompt narrowness” that gives really good results
that goldilocks band is different for different topics
plausible-sounding errors sneak in at all levels except the broadest, where it tends more towards very hedged “fluffy” statements like “be careful!”
However, if you treat it almost like a student, and inform it of the errors/consequences of whatever it suggested, it’s often surprisingly good at correcting the error, but here is where differences between how much it “understands” domains like “CSS” vs. “Twine’s Harlowe 3.3.4 macro format” become easier to see- it seems much more likely to make up function and features of Harlowe that resemble things from more popular languages.
For whatever reason, it’s really fun to engage it on things you have expertise in and correct it and/or rubber duck off of it. It gives you a weird child of expertise and outsider art.
My first thought, and the first thought my wife had, was that this idea feels really good at first, and the reasoning sound, but it also feels a bit like what you would do if you wanted to intentionally exacerbate echo-chamber effects. Whether it would it actually have that effect, I don’t know.
I’ve been doing this for years! When I worked in an office, I had a set of metal chopsticks I was able to leave on my desk — metal was easier to clean.
RE:Footnote #4:
I’ll come back to this at some point. Specifically, I’d like clicking that link either to take me to the correct note if it already exists, or CREATE the note if it doesn’t exist, while triggering the Templater action that generates all the nice dynamic content on the Daily Note.
I found today, after following this tutorial (which is great, btw, with some tweaks for personal preference this thoroughly fixes everything I felt missing from Obsidian), that putting the template in both the “Daily Notes” template AND as a “Folder Template” made the yesterday/tomorrow links works as-is, with the file either being visited, or created with the template. My hypothesis is the template you put directly into the Daily Notes settings only triggers when using the “Open Today’s Daily Note” button, so Templater’s “folder template” trigger is needed.
In fact, it seems like the Folder Template is all you need, but I have a hunch that the “direct” Daily Note template might be faster in some cases? It’s probably just a superstition, I don’t know if there’s a good way to test it.
EDIT: To make it immune to what setting you have for here new notes are created, I had to specifiy the full path in the template:
<< [[Daily Notes/<% fileDate = moment(tp.file.title, 'YYYY-MM-DD dddd').subtract(1, 'd').format('YYYY-MM-DD dddd') %>|Yesterday]] | [[Daily Notes/<% fileDate = moment(tp.file.title, 'YYYY-MM-DD dddd').add(1, 'd').format('YYYY-MM-DD dddd') %>|Tomorrow]] >>The path and the daily note name format have to match whatever you’ve set up for Daily Notes.
courage to reject an all powerful authority on moral grounds
This was the most interesting part of the whole story to me, and it’s an angle I haven’t quite seen in this type of story before. However, I think it was in competition with the personalities of Elohim and Shaitan. They felt too petty and talking-past-each-other to make sense as people from an enlightened race. Maybe if their “conflict” was also a pre-planned part of their strategy, instead of a squabble?
The cultural and literary references didn’t bother me, but they did mean that by the end of the first few paragraphs I was like, “Oh okay, we’re doing an Erich von Daniken/Assasin’s Creed/Prometheus,” and then everything played out about how I expected.
I wanted a few more surprises, I think. At first it felt like maybe the main characters were far-future humans, and maybe it would have been fun to let that possibility linger for longer. Or just focus in more on the central theme and how it could subvert and/or support the Ancient Aliens narrative.
But I did enjoy reading it! Got me visualizing some neat things.
Oh, and whenever you are able, run things through www.hemingwayapp.com and optimize for shortest length and lowest grade level without losing information.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
I ended up as part of a team managing the internal communication & knowledge platform for a company that was at the time (early 2020) about ~100,000 employees, now ~146,000. My area of responsibility now includes over 20,000 employees, but I do not directly oversee anyone. I did not have education or much experience particular to this domain, but somehow became a preferred pick for the role, so make of that what you will.
The strategy I’ve always tried to employ is to treat everyone as intelligent equals, and making as much effort as possible to understand, and earnestly explain, the way things are “supposed” to work in a bureaucratic perspective — who needs to approve, what process needs to be followed, while at the same time consciously addressing instances where what people want/need might be different, and that bureaucracies must be understood in that context. In other words, be aware of the Chesterton’s fence principle, but also be aware that taking down the fence is an option that may need to be discussed.
The most common… I don’t want to say “obstacle” because that feels so strong, but the thing I most often have to be consciously aware of, is getting the input of everyone whose input should be included. You have to actively seek it out, and push people to give input. It’s never because anyone feels “silenced” or anything like that, it’s more often that people just feel too busy, or feel their insight isn’t important enough, or is not different enough, or wouldn’t matter anyway. Voter turnout problems, now that I think about it.
These two talks cover a lot more in ways I think are really useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkLGLKcplkM — Concrete Practices to Be a Better Leader: Framing & Intention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRaFJHK0S4 — Game Studio Management: Making It Great
There’s also a little anecdote, by Adam Savage, talking about Michael Stevens, that I can’t find (it’s somewhere in his Q&A videos on the Tested channel), so I won’t try to directly quote it. Adam was talking about asking Michael how he manages to stay so respectful of people, even when telling them things they don’t know, and Michael answered something like “Overestimate their intelligence, underestimate their vocabulary.”
I think an important aspect to mention explicitly is that it’s paired with the phrase “a map that reflects the territory”. It’s important not because Harold Fiske or the Mississippi River are important to rationality, but because this image exemplifies the idea of that a map is meant to help you understand and reason about something that is not the map.
I agree. Their ‘candidate explanations’ felt unsatisfying when I got to them, because they spend so much time building up what a good explanation would necessarily feel like. Maybe that was the goal, but if it was, they didn’t make it explicit.
Watched this last night. Kurzgesagt is one of the greatest achievements YouTube has enabled, in my opinion.
As a LessWrong reader I had heard a lot of these ideas before, but part that surprised me was Scenario 1: Even if we “only” thrive about as long as other Earth mammals, the 200,000 years modern humans have been around is still only about 1/5th of the way through our story.
I’m doing this as a comment, not an answer, because it’s only slightly related to the specific question, but Matt Parker did some videos about similar “impossible” events and/or probability claims, and he includes discussions on why we tend to make errors like that, as humans.
How lucky is TOO lucky? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
How did the ‘impossible’ Perfect Bridge Deal happen? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-b-QJZdVA
I suppose the hope is that then there will be a third tier: “How to move your couch the right way, and why everyone thinks you need avocados for it.”
The above comment just helped me realise that the connotation above is why I like the word “credence”. Does “credence” have similar problems in other cultures though?
Can you elaborate more on whether there have been noticeable results in either A) taking successful actions based on the most recent predictions or B) improving the forecasting skills of the players? And if so- how were these things measured? How would you prefer to measure them?
All of their work is great, but for my favorite I highly recommend ‘Ra’, for similar reasons of feeling what it’s like to interrogate your own thoughts, senses, and reality itself.
https://qntm.org/ra
Also this fun little story (Valuable Humans in Transit) about an AI: https://qntm.org/transi