They/them
kithpendragon
Karma: 762
I have not seen any increase in spam quality or quantity and I have not spoken to anybody who told me that they have.
I am aware of the fear that the current generation of LLMs could make social engineering attacks much cheaper and more effective, but so far have not encountered so much as a proof of concept.
Use alarms and don’t ignore them, ever. Set the alarms to go off at the time when you want to start setting up for the next part of your day; e.g. getting ready for bed instead of lights-out time, setting up your workspace for the day instead of time to be fully productive, checking if you’re hungry instead of lunchtime, &c. You can set as many labeled alarms as you like on your phone and many watches, and you can schedule them to repeat regularly. If you don’t want to disturb people around you, set the alarm to vibrate and keep the device on your person. (A smart watch is exceptionally useful for this.)
If you need additional alarms to remind you to actually get started, set those too. I prefer to use just one alarm and let setup naturally flow into the intended activity, but do what you have to do to keep your day moving the way you want it to. Remember: never ignore your alarm. If you didn’t want to do the thing, you shouldn’t set the alarm in the first place! If you can’t actually start “getting ready for bed” (or whatever) when the alarm goes off, acknowledge the alarm and begin moving toward that goal. The setup phase can start with whatever you’re doing right now and ends when you’re ready to do the next thing, but it’s important to get that process moving!
Revisit your alarms as often as you need to to make sure you’re cueing the right habits/systems. This will be more frequently at first, but as you settle in to the routine you want you can review less often. And don’t be afraid to make changes if life takes an unexpected turn. If you think you might need an alarm later, turn it off instead of deleting it. That way you can just turn it back on again or reconsider deletion when you’re more sure.
Keep alarms only for your normal schedule. For events that occur irregularly, infrequently, or just once (e.g. next month’s game day, maintenance schedules, dentist appointments) schedule calendar reminders with appropriate lead times instead of setting alarms. This kind of reminder will vanish from your active systems automatically after it has fired, and you won’t clutter up your alarm cluster with dead items.
If a consistent bedtime is a problem for you, try working from the other end. Getting up at the same time every day means that if you didn’t get enough sleep you will be more tired in the evening and it will be easier to go to bed when you want. You can use this to explore how much sleep is optimal for your body and establish a bedtime you will want to keep.
I generally agree with this argument, and I endorse and encourage further exploration with the eventual goal of being able to predict the meaning of a ritual from its form and vice versa. The definition of ritual presented in the conclusions and further discussion in 4.1 strike me as a very good start toward that goal.
My biggest concern with the argument as presented is a slightly waffling attitude between the extremely strong (too strong?) statement of immutable motivation presented in track 2.3 and repeated in 3.5 and Conclusions, and the weaker treatment of that idea necessary for other parts of the argument such as 3.2. In the spirit of constructive feedback, I’ve included my full notes below.
2.3
one [model] of the world as it should be, that contains all our motives for action, and should not be vulnerable to any information about the current situation
Yes, goals and motives must be durable or we could not hold them up against (the current) reality and expect to win. But they must not be immutable. If our goals/motives could never change, we would not be able to abandon hopeless or lost causes, or to adopt new goals/motives as the situation evolves. This includes events where we succeed at a one-shot goal: it wouldn’t be very useful to keep striving for that which we have already achieved.
(e.g. I don’t have money—from which I might learn that I should not have money, if my desires adapted automatically to my experience)
You might, indeed, learn that very thing. It might feel like you don’t deserve to have money (or attention, cookies, sex, authority, &c.) or like having money has a subtle or overt wrongness about it. (Both could lead to self-sabotage behaviors such as ignoring obvious opportunities to increase your cashflow.) Or you could end up with a feeling that you can’t have enough money—no matter how wealthy you become it never seems like enough because “I have enough money” doesn’t rhyme with how the world (feels like it) works. This sort of learning seems to happen most in childhood, but with some work or sufficient pressure (such as trauma or radical resocialization) we can unlearn or newly-learn this sort of thing as adults.
By discounting automatic adaptation to experience and holding up a certain class of belief as invulnerable to changing conditions, this section appears to predict that growing beyond our childhood programming should be nigh impossible. In context, that would seem to undermine the utility of ritual beyond some critical life-stage when the programming solidifies. Perhaps this part of the argument is stated too strongly?
3.2
I think that motives like sex or self-interest need to be reinforced just as much as motives like justice and piety in order to keep influencing behavior throughout one’s life.
If such objects are not “vulnerable to any information about the current situation”, then why and how is their maintenance necessary?
To be clear, I’ve seen people give up on all those motives due to depression alone (and other circumstances) and fully agree that they can (but not necessarily will) corrode in response to changing conditions; but the quoted statement appears to be inconsistent with the argument presented in section 2.3.
3.4
Example: the myth of scarcity evokes the possibility of a desire of economic abundance, the rites of commerce and consumption transform this theoretical desire into a visceral one in a market setting
reminds me of: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QAmY46pciqYRZYcyM/bureaucracy-is-a-world-of-magic
3.5
they are intrinsically write-protected and beyond falsification
Referenced paragraph explicitly agrees with 2.3.
Conclusions
all motives are learned and reinforced by ritual, symbolism and emotional anchors, with biology nudging much more than it imposes.
I think this could use some more support, especially as regards very small children. Infants exhibit apparently deliberate behaviors; whence the motivations if not biology? Red flag on the word “all”.
our own motives differ from other elements of knowledge only by the fact that they are held beyond falsification, like a special subset of our general mental model of the universe (how the world should be, versus how the world is)
I suggest a third category to moderate the other two: that of how the world could possibly be. This would resolve the issues in tracks 2 and 3 by providing a (difficult) way for our motives to yield to reality when too much conflict arises between them.
… you don’t know how it changes your life and relationships to win—it’s probably quite positive …
I seem to remember reading that the overall impact to an individual of winning a large lottery is very frequently overwhelmingly negative; that nearly everybody winning those prizes ends up worse off five or ten years down the road than they were when they started.
… a 5-minute check of the easiest-to-find articles on the subject provides mixed opinions, so grain of salt and all that. But I didn’t see any anybody claiming that winning a lottery is all champagne and rainbows. Rather, most sources seem to be advising a great deal of caution and professional assistance to keep horrible consequences to a minimum.
Depends on what I’m doing. My baseline is verbal/auditory, and that is the mode my short-term memory loop utilizes most effectively. Reading printed text is primarily an auditory experience for me.
I don’t seem to have an autobiographical narrator as such, but I do a good deal of processing in the verbal mode, increasingly when I am less familiar with a task or process. If I am trying to learn a new task or process, that processing often escapes as a literal verbal output that sometimes makes my kid ask if I’m “talking to YouTube”. I guess this is a stronger version of an internal verbal/auditory processing loop.
When I’m very focused on a mechanical task like exercise or chopping vegetables or typing[1], I often switch to a more spatial mode; there is a visual component, but it would be more revealing to think of it as proprioceptive.
In meditation I often have access to a more sensory-first mode where I seem to experience mind-body inputs in what feels like a less processed way. Here, autobiographical thoughts “look” surprisingly similar to other sense inputs bubbling up from a pool of possibilities and either serially spooling out, usually as text (audio mode), or just settling back into the whole general mishmash.
When I’m cooking, I tend to think in smells and… processes I suppose? It’s like I know what smell I want and how to get there, but there’s not much visualization and very little verbalization unless I need to do math.
[^1] Refinement: I learned to touch-type back in the 90s, so this refers to the active translation of mental symbols to digital text. There is sometimes an audio stream happening of the names of the keys I press an instant after the fact, which I take to be an error-checking process. The actual mental objects involved in eventually outputting gestures have a very tactile flavor.
Somewhere along the line, somebody will have to deal with fewer irate passengers who just missed their trains because the signs were too small and verbose. I would agree that it is unlikely for anybody who can do something about the problem to connect the unfortunate signage with the irate passengers, though.
The text could be further condensed to something like:
Red Line to Ashmont
Arriving
Everybody knows they are passengers and that they are here for the train so that information is redundant on the sign.
GPT-4 will probably be insane.
Could we drill down on what exactly you mean here?
“Insane” as in enormously advanced or impressive?
“Insane” as in the legal condition where a person is not responsible for their actions?
“Insane” as in mentally unhinged?
Something else?
All of these?
claim that consequences are unforeseeABLE is bold. That would require “weather is beyond our ken, forever.”
Maniac Extreme type argument on a minor semantic point.
We can make some pretty good guesses, but right now we have no effective means to fully and accurately predict the long-term and long-distance meteorological, geological, and hydrological side effects of a project that results in a moderate-to-major change in the annual rainfall of a region. There will be consequences that we are unABLE to forsee. Some of those consequences could be large, some could be negative. Some could be both, maybe we don’t get either.
My read suggests that OP is probably less interested in increasing evaporation overall (though it would increase) than controlling where the water enters the atmosphere. There are places that are dry only because there happens to be a mountain in between them and the ocean, for example. Moving the water a long way is something we already know how to do (think oil pipelines, but containing salt water instead of hydrocarbon slurry). If it scales, this could make a substantial difference to such places.
Downside is that weather is the output of an insanely complex set of interconnecting natural systems and cycles. Making changes to the climate of a region this way will have unforeseeable side-effects over vast distances. Given the likely cost laying pipe over a mountain or whatever, I doubt many governments will be willing to take the risk of their big expensive weather-modification project provably messing up rainfall patterns or creating geologic instability or something in another state or country and having choose between paying enormous damages or eating their sunk construction costs. Most likely they would be unable to make that decision in a timely manner and default to doing both in the long run.
Then again, fracking, so I might be wrong about that.
How easy is it to change the sheets? I’ve heard speculation that loft beds are often difficult that way and I’d like to update on a 1st-hand account.
The statue made a rising whine as the lights began to pulse rhythmically. The legs stretched out, probing a bit in random directions for an instant before one found the surface of the floor and the rest immediately followed, each with its own sharp little click. When the machine appeared sure of its footing, it began to slowly push itself up while the weapon on its back glowed a dull red and swiveled around sharply. It was so beautiful! And a bit terrifying. I took a step back, and the statue seemed to notice! I can’t say how I knew, but I was sure it looked right at me.
All at once, the whine began to fall and the lights went dark again, starting with the weapon. The legs lost their strength and the body of the statue lowered gently to the floor. “Puts on a good show, doesn’t it?” the priest chuckled. “This one was mostly disabled generations ago, but the priests back then were clever enough to give us a little light and movement in case just seeing the machine wasn’t enough to restore somebody’s faith.” He took the strange black brain back out of the socket and returned it to its pedestal, carefully replacing the cover.
“I… I just wanted… too...” My voice was shaking as hard as my body. But the priest was still smiling. He put a kind hand on my shoulder and gently steered me back to the church. “It’s late. We will talk more tomorrow, after you’ve had whatever sleep you can get.”
I’ll agree with that, and I’d add that you need to be sure the index won’t change while you’re not looking so you can know that each position has been visited. Think of a cop checking parking meters, for a relatively low-stakes example. If they get distracted—say, by some irate motorist a few meters away complaining about a ticket from long ago—it would be easy for them to forget if they had processed the closest meter. If they walk/ride toward the motorist to be heard better, they might easily lose their place entirely. In this example, the cop’s physical location acts as an index, which is only good until the cop needs to move in an unexpected way. The distraction can lead to double-touching one or more meters. Worse, the cop might invisibly skip one or more meters unless they are maintaining some more durable kind of history like a checklist or other report.
A recently learned, broadly applicable pattern:
For tasks that look like traversing a list, a durable form of memory is required to assure the entire list is touched.
Imagine a rope extending from the start of your life to its end through time. This part of the universe being dense with entities, your rope will inevitably meet others. Sometimes they will pass near one another; they may cross; they may crash together and both change direction; they might even twine together and form part of a cable; but eventually your rope and the other will diverge, or one or both will come to its inevitable frayed end. As you move inexorably along through time, you may find that you like having your rope near some other rope or cable, or dislike the same. You can push against other ropes, or grasp them tightly, but time will force you forward at the same pace regardless. The trick, then, is to learn to move through life without getting ropeburns.
This rhymes with my experiences and thoughts. To say it another (slightly more general) way, it’s often the reactions of adults that are traumatizing well beyond anything else that happens to children (and other adults). It isn’t always the case that measured response produces a trauma-free experience, and some events tend to leave terrible scars. But where I see people bringing their own feelings into someone else’s situation is also where I see far more of lasting psychological trauma.
I don’t know that I’ve seen the original bet anywhere, but Eliezer’s specific claim is that the world will end by 2030 Jan 01. Here’s what I could find quickly on the topic:
Proposed heuristic: Any time you hear “don’t talk about that”, update toward the hypothesis “there is an oppressive regime here”
I know of a blog you might find interesting: “Small Gods” is a series of portraits of contemporary deities (the author made up) with short explanations of their domains. There are plenty of puns, and also some surprising seriousness. Maybe you’ll find it inspiring to explore some other work in the genre?
May I suggest donating to your local food pantry? Seems to be in the spirit of the day to sacrifice goods or capital so others can eat.