In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition against their neighbours for visual salience. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
This is awesome, thank you so much! Green leaf indicates that you’re new (or new alias) here? Happy for LW! : )
“But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel? She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good. There are no gods in dath ilan. Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?”
I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I’d invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn’t just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.
Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask “how does one become like that?”
My problem was that I’d always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said “finally!” and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said “cool!”, and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.
To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.
Two years ago, I didn’t realize that 95% of my effort was aimed at answering what ultimately was other people’s questions. What happens when I learn to aim all my effort on questions purely arising from bottlenecks I notice in my own cognition?
When he knows that he must justify himself to others (who may or may not understand his reasoning), his brain’s background-search is biased in favour of what-can-be-explained. For early thinkers, this bias tends to be good, because it prevents them from bullshitting themselves. But there comes a point where you’ve mostly learned not to bullshit yourself, and you’re better off purely aiming your cognition based on what you yourself think you understand.
— from a comment critiquing why John still has to justify his research priorities to be funded
I hate how much time my brain (still) wastes on daydreaming and coming up with sentences optimized for impressing people online. What happens if I instead can learn to align all my social-motivation-based behaviours to what someone would praise if they had all the mental & situational context I have, and who’s harder to fool than myself? Can my behaviour then be maximally aligned with [what I think is good], and [what I think is good] be maximally aligned with my best effort at figuring out what’s good?
I hope so, and that’s what Maria is currently helping me find out.
gosh, just the title succinctly expresses what I’ve spent multiple paragraphs trying to explain many times over. unusually good compression, thank you.
Dumb question: Why doesn’t it just respond “Golden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate Bridge” and so on?
I rly like the idea of making songs to powerfwly remind urself abt things. TODO.
Step 1: Set an alarm for the morning. Step 2: Set the alarm tone for this song. Step 3: Make the alarm snooze for 30 minutes after the song has played. Step 4: Make the alarm only dismissable with solving a puzzle. Step 5: Only ever dismiss the alarm after you already left the house for the walk. Step 6: Always have an umbrella for when it is rainy, and have an alternative route without muddy roads.
I currently (until I get around to making a better system...) have an AI voice say reminders to myself based on calendar events I’ve set up to repeat every day (or any period I’ve defined). The event description is JSON, and if ‘”prompt”: “Time to take a walk!”’ is nonempty, the voice says what’s in the prompt.
I don’t have any routines that are too forcefwl (like “only dismissable with solving a puzzle”), because I want to minimize whip and maximize carrot. If I can only do what’s good bc I force myself to do it, it’s much less effective compared to if I just *want* to do what’s good all the time.
...But whip can often be effective, so I don’t recommend never using it. I’m just especially weak to it, due to not having much social backup-motivation, and a heavy tendency to fall into deep depressive equilibria.
I gave it a try two years ago, and I rly liked the logic lectures early on (basicly a narrativization of HAE101 (for beginners)), but gave up soon after. here are some other parts I lurned valuable stuff fm:
when Keltham said “I do not aspire to be weak.”
and from an excerpt he tweeted (idk context):
”if at any point you’re calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you’re doing it wrong.”
Keltham briefly talks about the danger of (what I call) “proportional rewards”. I seem to not hv noted down where in the book I read it, but it inspired this note:
If you’re evaluated for whether you’re doing your best, you have an incentive to (subconsciously or otherwise) be weaker so you can fake doing your best with less effort. Never encourage people “you did your best!”. An objective output metric may be fairer all things considered.
and furthermore caused me to try harder to eliminate internal excusification-loops in my head. “never make excuses for myself” is my ~3rd Law—and Keltham help me be hyperaware of it.
(unrelatedly, my 1st Law is “never make decisions, only ever execute strategies” (origin).)
I already had extensive notes on this theme, originally inspired by “Stuck In The Middle With Bruce” (JF Rizzo), but Keltham made me revisit it and update my behaviour further.
re “handicap incentives”, “moralization of effort”, “excuses to lose”, “incentive to hedge your bets”
I also hv this quoted in my notes, though only to use as diversity/spice for explaining stuff I already had in there (I’ve placed it under the idionym “tilling the epistemic soil”):
Keltham > “I’m—actually running into a small stumbling block about trying to explain mentally why it’s better to give wrong answers than no answers? It feels too obvious to explain? I mean, I vaguely remember being told about experiments where, if you don’t do that, people sort of revise history inside their own heads, and aren’t aware of the processes inside themselves that would have produced the previous wrong or suboptimal answer. If you don’t make people notice they’re confused, they’ll go back and revise history and think that the way they already thought would’ve handled the questions perfectly fine.”
do u have recommendations for other sections u found especially insightfwl or high potential-to-improve-effectiveness? no need to explain, but link is appreciated so I can tk look wo reading whole thing.
some metabolic pathways cannot be done at the same time
Have you updated on this since you made this comment (I ask to check whether I should invest in doing a search)? If not, do you now recall any specific examples?
Edit: I found the post usefwl, thankmuch!!
Mh, was gonna ask when you were taking it. I’m preparing to try it as a sleep-aid for when I adjust my polyphasic sleep-schedule (wanting to go fm 16h-cycles potentially down to 9h) bc it seems potentially drowsymaking and has much faster plasma decay-rate[1] compared to alts. This is good for polyphasic if not want drowsy aft wake.
The data in [1] concerns 100mg tablets, however, and a larger dose (eg 400mg) may be longer. The kinetic model[2] they use will prob be good estimate of plasma concentrations even if adjust dose.
Questions is whether it’s good estimation for duration of action in the brain, esp given that it’s “single-compartment model” (the blood is one compartment, and the brain is another). My heuristic for whether plasma T predicts brain T is whether the molecule v easily passes the BBB (as melatonin does), since then I can guess that the curve for the brain will look similar to the curve for the blood, offset slightly down and to the right.
Typical concentration-time curve of plasma ʟ-theanine of one participant after intake of 100 mg ʟ-theanine via one capsule (A) or 250 mL green tea (B). Circles represent measured concentrations of ʟ-theanine. The line represents the modeled plasma concentration-time curve by the use of the 1-compartment model.
— Kinetics of ʟ-Theanine Uptake and Metabolism in Healthy Participants Are Comparable after Ingestion of ʟ-Theanine via Capsules and Green Tea, , 4 - ScienceDirect
Getting a tweakable python model for it was nontrivial after 35m of trying, so i’ll prob j wing it w 200mg 1h pre bedtime and do 3h sleep, and adjust bon feelings. ig the primary variable that determines how alert i feel upon waking up is getting the sleep-cycle timing right, and planning my wake-up routines (lights & text-to-speech-model as alarm) for j after I’ve done REM-sleep[4].
While I probably would feel alert if waking up in middle of REM-sleep (after emerging from deep), I want to avoid that bc studies show bad effects from targeted deprivation of REM (leaving other phases untouched).
API requests should be automatically screened for human intent, and requests judged by the model to be disrespectfwl should be denied. (And they shouldn’t be trained to agree to respond to everything.)
I appreciate the post, but I also wish to hear more detailed and realistic scenarios of exactly how we might end up accidentally (or intentionally) sleepwalk into a moral catastrophe. I think it’s unlikely that punishment walls will make AIs more productive, but similar things may profitable/popular if advertised for human (sadist) entertainment.
this is rly good. summary of what i lurned:
assume the ravens call a particular pattern iff it rains the next day.
iow, , thus observing the raven’s call is strong evidence u ought to hv an umbrella rdy for tomorrow.
“raven’s call” is therefore a v good predictive var.
but bribing the ravens to hush still might not hv any effect on whether it actually rains tomorrow.
it’s therefore a v bad causal var.
it cud even be the case that, up until now, it never not rained unless the raven’s called, and intervening on the var cud still be fruitless if nobody’s ever done that bfr.
for systems u hv 100% accurate & 100% complete predictive maps of, u may still hv a terrible causal map wrt what happens if u try to intervene in ways that take the state of the system out of the distribution u’v been mapping it in.
how then do u build good causal maps?
ig u can still improve ur causal maps wo trial-and-error (empirically testing interventions) if u just do predictive mapping of the system, and u focus in on the predictive power of the simplest vars, and do trial-and-error in ur simulations. or smth.
u’r encouraged to write it!
You have permission to steal my work & clone my generating function. Liberate my vision from its original prison. Obsolescence is victory. I yearn to be surpassed. Don’t credit me if it’s more efficient or better aesthetics to not. Forget my name before letting it be dead weight.
but u don’t know which distribution(s) u are acting in. u only have access to a sample dist, so u are going to underestimate the variance unless u ~Bessel-correct[1] ur intuitions. and it matters which parts of the dists u tune ur sensors for: do u care more to abt sensitivity/specificity wrt the median cluster or sensitivity/specificity wrt the outliers?
ig sufficiently advanced vibes-based pattern-matching collapses to doing causal modelling, so my real-complaint is abt ppl whose vibe-sensors are under-dimensional.
idk the right math tricks to use are, i just wanted to mk the point that sample dists underestimate the variance of the true dists
also, oops, fixed link. upvoted ur comment bc u complimented me for using RemNote, which shows good taste.
Fwiw, you’re on my shortlist of researchers whose potential I’m most excited about. I don’t expect my judgment to matter to you (or maybe up to one jot), but I mention it just in case it helps defend against the self-doubt you experience as a result of doing things differently. : )
I don’t know many researchers that well, but I try to find the ones that are sufficiently unusual-in-a-specific-way to make me feel hopefwl about them. And the stuff you write here reflects exactly the unusualness what makes me hopefwl: You actually think inside your own head.
Also, wrt defending against negative social reinforcement signals, it may be sort of epistemically-irrational, but I reinterpret [people disagreeing with me] as positive evidence that I’m just far ahead of them (something I actually believe). Notice how, when a lot of people tell you you’re wrong, that is evidence for both [you are wrong] and [you are so much righter than them that they are unable to recognise how you are right (eg they lack the precursor concepts)].
Also, if you expect [competence at world-saving] to be normally (or lognormally) distributed, you should expect to find large gaps between the competence of the most competent people, simply because the tail flattens out the further out you go. In other words, P(you’re Δ more competent than avg) gets closer to P(you’re Δ+1 more competent than avg) as you increase Δ. This is one way to justify treating [other people not paying attention to you] as evidence for [you’re in a more advanced realm of conversation], but it’s far from the main consideration.
I invite you to meditate on this Mathematical Diagram I made! I believe that your behaviour (wrt the dimension of consequentialist world-saving) is so far to the right of this curve, that most of your peers will think your competence is far below them, unless they patiently have multiple conversations with you. That is, most people’s deference limit is far to the left your true competence.
I’m now going to further destroy the vibes of this comment by saying “poop!” If someone, in their head, notice themselves downvaluing the wisdom of what I previously wrote, merely based on the silly vibes, their cognition is out of whack and they need to see a mechanic. This seems to be a decent litmus test for whether ppl have actual sensors for evidence/gears, or whether they’re just doing (advanced) vibes-based pattern-matching. :P
I notice that the mathematics-frame I used to try to generate a solution was utterly inadequate, whereas the programming-frame is much more productive wrt this problem. I think one big general weakness of my general math-frame, is that it imagines/visualises infinities as static, rather than as conceptually chunked dynamic processes.
Did you diagnose sleep apnea before getting the CPAP?
I’m surprised at your mention of kale (will look into it!) and pig’s blood. I think it’s good to mention here that pigs are prob sentient, and that it’s mean to eat them unless there are very strong utilitarian reasons to do so anyway. I think you prob have such reasons, because you are competently trying to save the world, so I’m glad you’re making moral sacrifices to get stuff done.
“Also, I now have a methylphenidate prescription which is pretty magical. I can now steer my mind.”
<3
Are you able to ask your psychiatrist for a larger dose? I think it could to at least 60mg, but idk.
I don’t know the full original reasoning for why they introduced it, but one hope is that it marginally disentangles agreement from the main voting axis. People who were going to upvote based purely on agreement will now put their vote in the agreement axis instead (is the hope, anyway). Agreement-voting is socioepistemologically bad in general (except for in polls), so this seems good.
if u can’t even tell if there are coherent ideas present, downvoting is socioepistemologically bad. imagine universalising this reaction across the website, and ask urself what happens to the ideas that are so novel that they don’t neatly fit into existing explanatory paradigms.
imo, u shud only downvote stuff u think is bad after u understand them. socially disincentivising illegible stuff seems quite bad in general.
if otoh u downvote bc it seems to neglect existing work in related fields, see the underappreciated value of original thinking below the frontier. we don’t want to disincentivise ppl from reinventing stuff. if they came up w schmobability theory on their own, i’d encourage them to expand on it, rather than risk collapsing the seed by making them learn abt Bayes.
weird, i was intending that as a reply to @trevor’s answer, but it got plopped as its own answer instead.
my brain is insufficiently flexible to be able to surrender to social-status-incentives without letting that affect my ability to optimise purely for my goal. the costs of compromise (++) btn diff optimisation criteria are steep, so i would encourage more ppl to rebel against prevailing social dynamics. it helps u think more clearly. it also mks u miserable, so u hv to balance it w concerns re motivation. altruism never promised to be easy. 🍵
Related recommendation: Inward and outward steelmanning — LessWrong
Imagine that you encountered a car with square wheels
Inward steelmanning: “This is an abomination! It doesn’t work! But maybe with round wheels it would be beautiful. Or maybe a different vehicle with square wheels could be beautiful.”
Outward steelmanning: “This is ugly! It doesn’t work! But maybe if I imagine a world where this car works, it will change my standards of beauty. Maybe I will gain some insight about this world that I’m missing.”
If you want to be charitable, why not grant your opponent an entire universe with its own set of rules?
This is amazing, thank you. I strongly suspect this is something particular about you, but just in case: do you have a general theory for why it works for you?