For this I could write an app that performs a gradual translation to chinese on the .epub file of a fiction I’m currently addicted to
Overly optimistic ballpark estimate is “800k words of text are enough to learn recognize 4k chinese characters”
Self
Karma: 121
Evidence in favour:Priors allow the possibility that languages are not created equal and lead to different cognitive speeds
Common discourse is biased towards assuming neutrality in all tribal identity adjacent matters AND the two visible opinions are “English & Chinese are equally fast” and “Chinese is faster”—“English is faster” is a missing opinion
Chinese websites tend to look “full of text” to me, which is explained neatly if information absorption rate is higher
(weak) The seeming competence of China
Evidence against:
Priors allow the possibility that languages are created equal bc they do not present bottlenecks in cognition
True!
Useless knowledge should neither be learned nor compressed, as both takes cognition.
The way I put that may have been overly obscure
But I’ve come to refer in my mind to the way the brain does chunking of information and noticing patterns and parallels in it for easier recall and use as just Compression.
Compression is what happens when you notice that 2 things share the same structure, and your brain just kinda fuses the shared aspects of the mental objcts together into a single thing. Compression = Abstraction = Analogy = Metaphor. Compression = Eureka moments. And the amazing thing is the brain performs cognition on compressed data just as fast as on original data, effectively increasing your cognitive speed.
For example, I think there’s large value in merging as much of your everyday observational data of humans as feasible together into abstracted psychology concepts, and I wanna understand models like BigFive (as far as they’re correct) much better on intuitive levels.
Yes. The product I bought identifies itself as “Sceletium tortuosum”.
I’ve only tried 1 brand/product, and haven’t seen any outstanding sources on it either, so I can’t offer much guidance there.I can anecdotally note that the effects seem quite strong for a legal substance at 0.5g, that it has short term effects + potentially also weaker long term effects (made me more relaxed? hard to say) (probs comparable to MDMA used in trauma therapy)
Compressing existing knowledge >> Acquiring new knowledge
Kanna is a legal substance dubbed Nature’s MDMA, likely working as an empathogen
Kanna seems to quite precisely increase my BigFive::Extraversion::Warmth[1]
Subjectively this feels like suddenly all the people you see are “your friends”, and like you could just walk up to them, strike up a conversation, and start bantering
Self’s Shortform
DHEA is a metabolic precursor of testosterone, among other things, and an OTC supplement in the US
Single dose DHEA seems to 1:1 have increased my BigFive::Extraversion::Assertiveness[1]
As a subset of that, it seems to have boosted my executive functioning
The execfunc boost is (as I read later) vaguely consistent with ADHD research
It also changes my cognition and motivation in ways I’m not fully comfortable with
There’s a subjective 15% chance the mindstate switch was instead placebo-induced
Downvoters: consider “Deception increases predictability”
“Honesty reduces predictability” seems implausible as a thesis.
OpenAI successfully waging the memetic war, as usual
Awesome!
My faves are #4 Intuition Flooding and #12 Incremental Reading. Will try them when I have slack and a topic of interest.
#2 Immersive Reading seems intriguing. I’ve noticed in myself a sense of my reading speed being capped by mental critical filtering processes. I feel like I could increase my comprehension speed at the cost of absorbing contents less discriminately.
#3 Recursive Sampling and #7 Spot the Core are strategies I’ve discovered myself, but no less useful for that.
#8. Triangulating Genius seems effortful but like a great fit for particular cases. #9 Expert Observation is great where the material exists. (Someone should do youtube videos liveblogging their math learning or social situation navigation, for me)
Amusing instructive and unfortunate this post’s actual meaning got lost in politics. IMO it’s one of the better ones.
Am left wondering if “local” here has a technical meaning or is used as a vague pointer.
What people need to get is that Lying is the weaker subset of Deception. It’s the type you can easily call out and retaliate against.
Which is why we evolved to have strong instinctive reactions to it.
I take away:
While doubt may involve encountering disconfirming evidence for a held belief—and it’s proper to immediately update on the doubt-creating evidence and thereby factor the expected result of further inquiry into your belief-state, -
Doubt itself is a pointer to a location of yet-unseen evidence. To a specific line of inquiry that may or may not disconfirm the held belief in question.
The inverse, or perhaps a generalization to positive and negative cases, is then Suspicion.
Suspicion points to locations of likely belief-creating or belief-modifying evidence.
Edit: meditating on what this post points to—finding in myself instances of the sensation of rational-doubt, and dwelling on them—proved useful.
I find it important for rationalists to think and talk more about deception.
While in honesty the post is a bit long for my taste, I like the way it approaches the overton window with this kind of dark-artsy, borderline-political topic and presents a plainly-insightful case study.
I’d say Accidentally Load Bearing structures are (statistically speaking) always the work of another optimizer: - someone saw the structure, and built another (architectural, behavioral,) structure on top of it.
So the key question is whether or not this structure may at some point have seemed useful to someone. (In a way that can be retrospectively broken.)
I think the post loses out on mental succinctness not explaining this.
Insightful: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-evolution-of-culture/
Best intro on memetics I’ve seen
Gave me an additional “evaluability dimension” for cultures and history