Yeah. This prompts me to make a brief version of a post I'd had on my TODO list for awhile:
"In the 21st century, being quick and competent at 'orienting' is one of the most important skills."
(in the OODA Loop sense, i.e. observe -> orient -> decide -> act)
We don't know exactly what's coming with AI or other technologies, we can make plans informed by our best-guesses, but we should be on the lookout for things that should prompt some kind of strategic orientation. @jacobjacob has helped prioritize noticing things like "LLMs are pretty soon g...
I'm looking for personal rules one might live by which adhere to a specific criteria outlined below, following an example.
I have a personal rule I've been following which is "No looking at screens in the bed where I sleep" I find this to be an extremely helpful and successful rule despite being someone who struggles to impose rules on myself.
I think one main reason it's successful for me is there aren't really any meaningful tradeoffs I'm making. If I'm feeling a need/compulsion to comfortably self soothe on my phone I can use another piece of furniture.
This rule doesn't ever result in bargaining with myself until I concede to breaking the rule, even at my lowest I'm easily appeased, just so long as it's in a slightly different...
I'm not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but one thing I do is store things I need for work and travel in consistent bags.
For example, my work laptop and my badge live in specific parts of a work-specific backpack, and I never the leave the badge anywhere except in the specific pocket of the backpack or attached to my belt.
For travel, I keep a couple things that are annoying to forget in my carry-on bag (travel-sized soap, conditioner, toothpaste, an un-opened toothbrush, a multi-country power-adapter and a spare swim suit). A battery and ant...
A new year has come. It's 2024 and note-taking isn’t cool anymore. The once-blooming space has had its moment. Moreover, the almighty Roam Research isn’t the only king anymore.
The hype is officially over.
At this time of year, when many are busy reflecting on the past year while excitingly looking into the future, I realized it's a good opportunity to look back at Roam’s madness timeline. The company that took Twitterverse and Silicon Valley by storm is now long after its breakthrough.
Roam was one of those phenomena that happen every other few years. Its appearance in our lives not only made the “tools for thought” niche fashionable. It marked a new era in the land of note-taking apps. In conjunction with a flourishing movement of internet intellectuals[1], it...
I’m using a different but similar approach of incorporating SRS into Roam instead ( https://vlad.roam.garden/apply-Spaced-Repetition-to-evergreen-notes-that-you-want-to-remember-or-periodically-rise-to-attention ).
Something I'd like to try at LessOnline is to somehow iterate on the "Public Doublecrux" format. I'm not sure if I'll end up focusing on it, but here are some ideas.
Public Doublecrux is a more truthseeking oriented version of Public Debate. The goal of a debate is to change your opponent's mind or the public's mind. The goal of a doublecrux is more like "work with your partner to figure out if you should change your mind, and vice versa."
Reasons to want to do public doublecrux include:
Doublecrux sounds like a better thing than debate, but why such an event should be live? (apart from "it saves money/time not to postprocess")
My timelines are lengthening.
I've long been a skeptic of scaling LLMs to AGI *. To me I fundamentally don't understand how this is even possible. It must be said that very smart people give this view credence. davidad, dmurfet. on the other side are vanessa kosoy and steven byrnes. When pushed proponents don't actually defend the position that a large enough transformer will create nanotech or even obsolete their job. They usually mumble something about scaffolding.
I won't get into this debate here but I do want to note that my timelines have lengthe...
It is easier to ask than to answer.
That’s my whole point.
It is much cheaper to ask questions than answer them so beware of situations where it is implied that asking and answering are equal.
Let's say there is a maths game. I get a minute to ask questions. You get a minute to answer them. If you answer them all correctly, you win, if not, I do. Who will win?
Preregister your answer.
Okay, let's try. These questions took me roughly a minute to come up with.
What's 56,789 * 45,387?
What's the integral from -6 to 5π of sin(x cos^2(x))/tan(x^9) dx?
What's the prime factorisation of 91435293173907507525437560876902107167279548147799415693153?
Good luck. If I understand correctly, that last one's gonna take you at least an hour1 (or however long it takes to threaten...
Though sometimes the obligation to answer is right, right? I guess maybe it's that obligation works well at some scale, but then becomes bad at some larger scale. In a coversation, it's fine, in a public debate, sometimes it seems to me that it doesn't work.
A stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies.
Student debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population. American college graduates have nearly double the income of high school graduates. African Americans are far underrepresented among degree holders compared to their overall population share.
Within the group of college graduates debt cancellation increases equity, but you can’t get around the fact that 72% of African Americans have no student debt because they never went to college....
Wow, I didn't realize just how bad student debt cancellation is from so many perspectives. Now I want more policy critiques like this.
Author’s Note: Though I’m currently a governance researcher at Convergence Analysis, this post is unaffiliated with Convergence. The opinions expressed are solely my own.
You’ve seen it a dozen times at this point. You’re probably broadly aligned philosophically, but haven’t thought terribly deeply about the details. You generally support Andrew Yang’s $12k / year “Freedom Dividend” as “moving in the right direction”, even if it’s economically flawed.
The argument goes roughly like this: “All of our jobs are about to be automated away with AI technology and robotics! We’ll end up soon in a post-work society with massive unemployment unless we can find a way to distribute the benefits of AI automation fairly. We need a universal basic income to protect humans.”
To recap - universal basic income is a...
Commenting on the basis of lessons from some experience doing UBI analysis for Switzerland/Europe:
The current systems has various costs (time and money, but maybe more importantly, opportunities wasted by perverse incentives) associated with proving that you are eligible for some benefit.
On the one hand, yes, and its a key reason why NIT/UBI systems are often popular on the right; even Milton Friedman already advocated for a NIT. That said, there are also discussions that suggest the poverty trap - i.e. overwhelmingly strong labor disincentives for poor, f...
Might be mainly driven by an improved tokenizer.
I would be shocked if this is the main driver, they claim that English only has 1.1x fewer tokens, but seem to claim much bigger speed-ups