Yes please, more please!
Your writing is more enjoyable than that of many native English speakers, and I am one.
Will you do a sequence with more stories?
Tell them the way that’s fun to tell, like here, and they leak rationality. The “systematized winning” kind, because it’s all rooted in finding ways not to die in situations where statistics would suggest you really ought to.
Think, at least a little, before you act in a new or complex way.
Oh. Is this what they meant by “think before you act”? Because thinking before every action goes exactly as well as you, careful author of that sentence, would expect.
There are at most as many gods as people.
why can’t we all have unique pantheons?
Intentional symbolism to place the singularity, start of a whole new everything, in the springtime of the second year?
I would try playing it. Will be interesting to see how it plays at a mostly non-rationalist table :)
We put decades of work into getting software to behave less like databases, and then act surprised when it doesn’t behave like a database. C’est la vie.
what set of exercises do you prefer to strengthen and stabilize the rotator cuffs?
I’m not near any gyms and have plenty of space, so I strongly prefer the safety profile of barbell + squat rack. If something goes wrong and I lose control of the weight, it’s good to know that there’s no way for it to hit me. And part of progressing is sometimes trying a weight that you’re only 80% or 90% sure you can actually lift successfully—I’d much rather the failure mode be clank “whoops!” than however many pounds of iron to the face.
I also find that it’s easier to track whether I’m using good form with a barbell vs dumbbells. The cues to moving a bar correctly are to keep it level and trace the correct path in a plane with it (usually straight up and down), whereas the cues to moving dumbbells correctly are… something about simultaneously tracking the position and orientation of two separate objects in 3-space? Definitely more complicated to keep track of all the moving parts when there are twice as many.
Barbells are also a compromise between fixed and adjustable dumbbells. You’ll probably want different weights for different exercises, and the exact weight you want for each will slowly increase over time. With a barbell, you modify the two ends to change the weight, and you can get plates as small as a few ounces if you need to increase the weight super slowly. With dumbbells, either you use fixed increments and have to store a lot of pairs, or you use adjustable ones and have to modify twice as many ends for each weight change.
If your access to equipment, space, and trainers is different from mine, though, your conclusions about the best options for training will likely be different as well.
eliminate predation.
Ok, I’ll bite—who was doing the predation, and what are you suggesting ought to happen to those creatures?
I agree that adding preventable new suffering is bad, but I don’t follow that into any obviousness that it’s good to meddle deeply in nature’s feedback loops. To oversimplify, let’s imagine a button that releases a virus which painlessly inflicts all living beings with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain. I think it would be bad to push that button, but the way you’re describing suffering creates a mental model for me in which you would push it. I’ve probably missed something about your perspective that makes it seem obvious to you why that wouldn’t be the case, but I hope the example highlights which important bit turns out to need to be said out loud to get the idea across to others.
guerrilla, not gorilla, warfare :)
a good read. thank you.
have you ruled out the powdered peanut butter options? They tend to come in at under half the calories of regular PB, while getting pretty close in replicating the flavor and texture. Assuming you’re serious about the psychological impact of removing all peanut butter products from your diet, at least.
Feels to me like at the moment, the “character layer” handles transforming a “you” into an “I”. I find it conspicuously absent in smaller models running locally, though maybe the absence is just more obvious with CoT than without it.
I’ve also noticed that the “training data” we get as humans is primarily focusing on or contextualized relative to ourselves, whereas the parts you’re referring to as ground layers don’t really have a concept of the LLM as an entity so they tend to assume they’re humans on that level.
saw a post from zvi on twitter yesterday, “remember that this corner of the world has a very different outlook than most other corners. if you don’t have random day-to-day ai queries what are you even doing all day?”, in reply to someone asking “who the fuck has random day-to-day ai queries?” (yes, i looked at that on my phone and typed it out, because my twitter account for following tpot people lives only on my phone, and my lw account lives only on a device with a real keyboard, and getting the link from point A to point B would have been even more hassle)
i think the lines between worlds could be defined relative to search. like, in the beginning, there was no search. if you needed information, it was given to you. if it wasn’t given to you, you made do without it. some people still live there.
then there was search, and some of us learned how to use it (others definitely didn’t!) i’ve had to train my parents carefully to search, and my mother has taken to it better than my father. search at its best, with grep within a single local text file, is amnesiac, immaterial and eternal—there is no social calculus around having searched becuase the social implications of “over there on the computer” are unrelated to the contents of the typing and reading going on. i think I speak search with a faint accent, like a kid who moved countries in their early teens.
AI feels to me like it’s at its best when I use it as search on ideas. It also works as a bigger room to layout concept prototypes in, but that’s a higher barrier to entry; it’s harder for me to learn to design and build bigger conceptual things than it is to just use good search as search.
so we have two search modalities, conventional/literal and linguistic. perhaps worth noting, i don’t think modern google is the embodiment of the old-school literal form of search—i think database queries are what that grew up into as it got with the times. Modern google and google-alikes feels like it’s a database trying to be the kind of concept-search that LLMs surpass it at.
it feels to me like the question of which search tech is superior is answered by the context of what you’re searching for. it’s the difference between numbers and letters, the difference between data and information, the difference between intelligence and wisdom—it’s a level-of-abstraction kind of distinction.
thus the question becomes, for those of us who do queries all day, what are we querying? DB queries are for things with right answers, because they can kinda read a smudged copy of the answer key to the test of reality. AI queries are worse at that, but they’re better at a different kind of thing.
There’s also a kind of creativity and engineering where you query reality directly. There are areas where direct-query is a lot better, and other areas where db-query is a lot better… like if i wanna know about how this one item will behave, i should examine it, whereas if i want to know how items of this type should be expected to behave, i should not extrapolate over-much from my examination of a single item. it’s like something not-turning-up-in-search that i recall seeing recently, perhaps a youtube short from chris boden, about the difference between “engineering” and “the knack”—if you have the knack you can overbuild anything, but engineering is the art of cutting away all the excess to build the bare minimum-viable of any given thing. If you’re using the knack, it gets to the point where you ask the materials what they’re gonna do, and they give you a better answer than the books about them might.
but why would people close with AI have that physical experience? Material hobbies are expensive and messy and cost a lot of storage space and waste time you could spend arguing about x-risk, and when material hobbies do arise, computer-people have the means to get idealized standardized raw materials for them from wherever in the world they’re made, rather than having to make do with whatever you can find nearby. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, you’re exceptional. But most people? Have you ever tried teaching a room full of most-people to tie a new knot? Modern life very rarely calls “us people” to direct physical problem-solving, us who do so well or at least so connectedly online. So of course we’d forget the other way, the get-your-information-straight-from-the-source way, if we veer away from the areas where that way’s better.
There are probably other hobbies where this is relevant. Maybe you like hiking, maybe you sail. You are probably worse at predicting the weather than the forecast on your phone, but you’ve probably met a human who was better. It’s kinda like that, with the kind of queries that lose resolution if you even put them into language. Most people building something real have to go through a quantified level, a CoT corrigibility level, to be adequately assessed and supervised on their thought process. At least, that’s the engineering-degree paradigm. And the engineering-interview one, or at least the fields that larp as engineering, “solve this problem on the whiteboard and show your work”. It’s an implicit prioritization of the kind of work that can be shown.
anyways, that’s all to say that i think there’s a certain kind of smart that’s agnostic of whether you’re expanding your worldview in the externally legible way or the less-legible ones. i think there’s a “kind of guy” who is basically the same “kind”, in the meaningful ways, as the constantly-querying-AI one… but the kind who queries the world instead of the world-model. It probably takes both kinds. What’s “it”? Who knows!
I have a lot of elderly neighbors. Alcoholism’s been a major factor in about half the deaths in the past few years. The runners-up in this popularity contest are cannabis of the grow-it-on-the-sly strength, and opioids because they’re nasty but people tend to start them later in life.
If we’re being literal about drugs as “non-caloric chemicals we ingest to modify our physiology”, the most popular drug in the elderly is probably a blood pressure med of some kind.
I’m not claiming that we’ve solved any substance abuse! I’m claiming that you and Dalrymple appear to be ignoring the potential lessons we can learn from the equilibrium that society has reached with the most widely used and abused modern intoxicant. The equilibrium doesn’t have to be perfect, nor to solve every problem, in order to be a relatively stable and well-tolerated compromise between allowing individual freedom and punishing misbehavior.
Similar stuff that’s worked for me includes:
lock the notifications down completely. Every notification on your phone should be something your ideal self cares about—usually direct human contact. Might help to differentiate between “public” vs “private” apps—“public” apps aren’t allowed notifications because it’s the algo pushing stuff on you, whereas “private” apps are allowed notifications because they consistently represent an actual human who you’ve invited to contact you.
Model your engagement with content as training your algorithm. Just as you probably wouldn’t cuss in front of a toddler that’s absorbing everything you say, be careful of watching garbage because everything you watch is training it that that’s what you like.
Block all ads and the too-aggressive engagement feeds. Unhook is one extension that does this for YouTube; I keep the home feed but hide everything else (recommended vids, shorts, etc)
Move your app icons on your phone whenever you catch yourself reflexively opening an app. Put something else in the location where you’ve formed the habit of tapping when bored.
replace “don’t wanna x” with “do wanna y”. Same principle as teaching a dog to pick up a pillow instead of “don’t bark” when it hears someone at the door—the easiest “don’t x” goals are shaped like “do y” ones. Maybe that’s “use my flashcards”, maybe that’s “read a book”, maybe that’s “be still and quiet”… the trick is to start your “do y” as easy as possible. If it’s “read a book”, start yourself on the trashiest easiest most clickbaity-engaging book you can find, or even a magazine or comic.
Alcohol is also a drug. If Dalrymple really means “drugs” when he says “drugs”, it would follow that he’s advocating for prohibition to protect alcoholics from themselves.
We seem to have found a relatively tolerable equilibrium around alcohol where the substance is widely available, the majority of individuals who can enjoy it recreationally are free to do so, and yet it’s legally just as intolerable for an intoxicated person to harm others as it would be for a sober person to take the same actions. Some individuals have addiction problems, and we have varyingly effective programs in place to help them deal with that, but ultimately the right of the majority to enjoy it responsibly (and the rights of the businesses to sell it to those who can use it responsibly) trump the “rights” of the minority to be protected from themselves by the government.
Maybe to get the same equilibrium around other drugs, we would need harsher punishments for the antisocial behaviors that we’re actually trying to prevent by banning the drugs themselves. All I know is that anyone who unironically makes “ban the intoxicants” claims without considering what we can learn from our most widely accepted and normalized intoxicants is speaking on some level other than the literal and logical.
One lens to view AI is as a prediction engine—predict what color to make each pixel, predict what word to put next.
Whoever is first to applying this predictive skill to stock markets will probably make immense amounts of money. Then again, people are probably already trying to do this, which creates a situation unlike that from which we derive the historic data to train on, which might render it impossible?
On the gripping hand, large slow and powerful institutions want to make the numbers go up and to the right.
I’ve also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
FWIW, this is likely to be a worse problem with a meal replacement than a protein bar, and a worse problem with a protein bar than a frozen option.
bring to work
That adds complexity. Are there social norms at work which necessitate eating with others? If so, having a shake or similar every day may not meet those needs.
I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening
Are you aware of the concept of OMAD (one meal a day)? I don’t think it’s super likely that this is the right solution for you, but it seems like you’d learn useful things about the best solution for your food-is-inconvenient problem by considering it as an option and determining why you would rule it out. Basically unless you’re diabetic or attempting to gain weight, you can just have all your day’s calories in a single meal instead of spread across multiple. Again, there are many reasons why this might not be a good fit, but it seems worth making sure that it’s in your overton window as an option that works for some people.
(edit to add)
packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?
a “full meal” for someone who’s smaller, sedentary, or pursuing weight loss can be a protein bar. A “full meal” for someone who’s larger, more active, or pursuing weight gain can be 10x that amount, at the extreme. We sort of have a standard daily intake of 2,000kcal from nutrition facts, but not even food packaging attempts to prescribe how many meals an individual eats in a day, how they distribute their intake across those meals, and therefore asking whether an item is packaged in a size suitable for a “full meal” is like asking whether a piece of software will run on “a computer”.
we do not have a robot that is perfectly capable of executing the “saving grandma” task
Do you mean to imply that humans are perfectly capable of executing the “saving grandma” task?
Opening a door in a burning building at the wrong time can cause the entire building to explode by introducing enough oxygen to suddenly combust a lot of uncombusted gases.
I’m not convinced that there exists a “perfect solution” to any task with 0 unintended consequences, though, so my opinions probably aren’t all that helpful in the matter.
I notice that I am confused: I experience comparable price and convenience, and superior subjective experience of eating, by purchasing pre-made frozen meals and microwaving them. I experience comparable price and superior travel convenience by throwing a protein bar in my bag on the way out the door.
Possible reasons one might prefer a meal replacement over comparably easy “real” food include:
less waste? a powder mixed into a drink would trade the hassle of washing a reusable bottle for the trash creation of discarding a disposable bottle
Flavor/texture concerns? If you hate eating real food for sensory reasons, you may love some meal replacements and hate others
Nutritional concerns? If there’s a specific nutrition profile that you’re seeking which can’t be obtained through sufficiently easy conventional meals, that seems worth mentioning
time savings? if you have special scheduling needs, or experience unusually high cognitive load from thinking about choosing meals, “meal replacements” might be superior?
Based on observing the eating behaviors of many friends and acquaintances, I’d speculate that the soylent-style “meal replacement” market has split between meal delivery services that offer better flavor/variety/nutrition for equivalent ease, and protein/supplement products that offer more optimized and targeted nutrition than the originals. In short, I suspect but cannot prove that demand for soylent/huel has decreased because options more pleasant to eat and otherwise cost/convenience equivalent have become more mainstream.
Anyways, could you clarify what successful meal replacement would mean to you, if you would like suggestions on how to get there?
Don’t people notice the ways that seeing themselves engage in particular behaviors updates their own self-image? The payoff for being polite to language users is that it makes me see myself as the kind of person who is generally polite. The results of being mean and bullying would be that I would come to see myself as the kind of person who is okay with engaging in mean and bullying behavior to get what they want.
Or maybe everybody else has a skill at compartmentalizing which I lack? But I absolutely catch myself applying prompting strategies to human conversation, because the part of me which does that self-concept feedback loop doesn’t differentiate between my behaviors toward animate audiences versus my behaviors toward “inanimate” ones.