I found Steven Byrnes valence concept really useful for my own thinking about psychology more broadly and concretely when reading text messages from my contextualizing friend (in that when a message was ambiguous, guessing the correct interpretation based on valence worked surprisingly well for me).
Morpheus
Karma: 660
I ended up dodging the bullet of loosing money here, because I was a bit worried that Nate Silvers model might have been behind, because the last poll then was on the 23rd. I was also too busy with other important work to resolve my confusions before the election. My current two best guesses are:
The French whale did not have an edge,
The neighbour polling method is a just-so story to spread confusion, but he actually did have an edge
I don’t understand correctly how this neighbour polling method is supposed to work.
In any case, if Polymarket is still legal in 4 years I expect the prediction market on the election to be efficient relative to me and I will not bet on it.
I had a discussion with @Towards_Keeperhood what we would expect in the world where orcas either are or aren’t more intellectually capable than humans if trained. Main pieces I remember were: Orcas already dominating the planet (like humans do), large sea creatures going extinct due to orcas (similar to how humans drove several species extinct (Megalodon? Probably extinct for different reasons, weak evidence against? Most other large whales are still around)). I argued that @Towards_Keeperhood was also underestimating the intricacies that hunter-gatherers are capable of, and gave the book review for the secret of our success as an example. I think @Towards_Keeperhood did update in that direction after reading that post. I also reread that post and funnily enough stumbled over some evidence that orcas might have fallen into a similar “culture attractor” for intelligence, like humans:
Learn from old people. Humans are almost unique in having menopause; most animals keep reproducing until they die in late middle-age. Why does evolution want humans to stick around without reproducing?
Because old people have already learned the local culture and can teach it to others. Heinrich asks us to throw out any personal experience we have of elders; we live in a rapidly-changing world where an old person is probably “behind the times”. But for most of history, change happened glacially slowly, and old people would have spent their entire lives accumulating relevant knowledge. Imagine a world where when a Silicon Valley programmer can’t figure out how to make his code run, he calls up his grandfather, who spent fifty years coding apps for Google and knows every programming language inside and out.
Quick google search revealed Orcas have menopause too! While chimpanzees don’t! I would not have predicted that.
Typo in the linked document:
There is no one is coming to save us.
Can someone who is already trading on Polymarket or is planning to do so soon tell me if there are any hidden fees (or ways my money might be locked up for longer than I expect) if I trade on Polymarket? Four years ago I got hit by enormous ether gas fees on Augur, which still made my bet positive EV, but only barely so (I had to wait quite a while for the gas cost to go that low and was loosing out on investing the money and my attention). I plan to bet ~$3K-$7K and think Kamala Harris has a 45% chance of winning. Is that enough for all the transaction costs to vanish?
One confounder: depression/mania. Recently (the last ~two weeks) I have been having bad sleep (waking up 3-7 am and not feeling sleepy anymore (usually I sleep from midnight to 9). My current best guess is that the problem is that my life has been going too well recently, leading to a self-sustaining equilibrium where I have little sleep and mania. Reduced my medication today (~55mg instead of 70mg) which seems to have helped with the mania. I had another day with slight mania 1 month ago when sleeping little in order to travel to a conference, so in the future I’ll probably reduce my medication dose on such days. Took a friend describing his symptoms on too much medication for me to realize what is going on.
I am also interested in finding a space to explore ideas which are not well-formed. It isn’t clear to me that this is intended to be such a space. This may simply be due to my ignorance of the mechanics around here.
For not well-formed ideas, you can write a Quick Take (can be found by clicking on your profile name in the top right corner) or starting a dialogue if you want to develop the idea together with someone (can be found in the same corner).
I feel like there should exist a more advanced sequence that explains problems with filtered evidence leading to “confirmation bias”. I think the Luna sequence is already a great step in the right direction. I do feel like there is a lack of the equivalent non-fiction version, that just plainly lays out the issue. Maybe what I am envisioning is just a version of What evidence filtered evidence with more examples of how to practice this skill (applied to search engines, language models, someone’s own thought process, information actively hidden from you, rationality in groups etc.).
adult augmentation 2-3std for the average person seems plausible, but for the few +6std people on earth it might just give +0.2std or +0.3std, which tbc I think is incredibly worthwhile.
Such high diminishing returns in g based on genes seems quite implausible to me, but would be happy if you can point to evidence to the contrary. If it works well for people with average Intelligence, I’d expect it to work at most half as well with +6sd.
I am a bit confused why some of these theories would be so hard to test? It seems like some core pathways that seem like they wouldn’t be reversible even in naive stem cells under any circumstances (like transposons copying themselves successfully), could possibly be tested by checking if clones derived from older cells age faster or something along those lines? The same goes for children from older parents? (Not sure to which extent that test would be made harder by all the mechanisms keeping the germ line immortal)
I don’t know where anger fits into this. Also I should look at how these behaviors manifest in other animals.
Hypothesis based on the fact that status is a strong drive and people who are on the outer ends of that spectrum get classified as having a “personality disorder” and are going to be very resistant to therapy:
weak-status-fear==psychopathy: psychopathy is caused by the loop leading to fear of loosing status, being less strong than average or possibly broken. (psychopathy is Probably on a spectrum. I don’t see a reason why little of this feeling would be less optimal than none.)
strong-status-fear==(?histrionic personality disorder)
weak-status-seeking-loop==(?schizoid personality disorder)
strong-status-seeking-loop==(?narcissism)
Was thinking about Steven Byrnes agenda to figure out social drives and what makes a psychopath a psychopath. One clearly existing social drive that seemed to be a thing was “status-seeking” and “status-fear” (fear of loosing status). Both of these could themselves be made of several drives? The idea that status-seeking and status-fear are different came to me when trying to think of the simplest hypothesis explaining psychopathy and from introspecting that both of these feelings feel very different to me and distinct from other fears. These two could be made more mostly separate loops, but I can’t complicate my fake framework even more just yet.
If someone is interested, I’d write a post how to stress test this fake-framework and what I’d expect in the world where it is true or isn’t (Most interesting would be social drives that are distinct from the above? Or maybe they use some of the same sub-circuitry? Like jealousy seems obviously like it would fit under strong status fear, so histrionic personality would go with being more jealous)
Since I am already on the fancy note-taking train, I’d find examples of your actual note files way more interesting.
On my phone, rotating the screen by 180° quickly reverses the direction and then I rotate it back slowly.
I think from the perspective of a radical probabilist, it is very natural to not only have a word of where your current point estimate is at, but also have some tagging for the words indicating how much computation went into it or if this estimate already tries to take the listeners model into account also?
I misread your whole post by thinking your title implied “your post would question whether the entropy increased=> the post argues it decreases” and then I was reading sloppily and didn’t notice my error.
Also you should halt and reevaluate your intuitions if they lead you to believe there is a perpetual motion machine.
Photosynthesis? Most of the carbon is bound from CO2 by using sun exergy.
Cool post. I agree with the many-shot part in principle. It strikes me that in a few years (hopefully not months?), this will look naive in a similar way that all the thinking on ways a well boxed AI might be controlled look naive now. If I understand correctly, these kinds of simulations would require a certain level of slowing down and doing things that are slightly inconvenient once you hit a certain capability level. I don’t trust labs like OpenAI, Deepmind, (Anthropic maybe?) to execute such a strategy well.
This argument against subagents is important and made me genuinely less confused. I love the concrete pizza example and the visual of both agent’s utility in this post. Those lead me to actually remember the technical argument when it came up in conversation.