= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Newsome comments on This post is for sacrificing my credibility! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (341)
What did he actually do, though?
For half the time, with Anna, I was an intern, not a Fellow. During that time I did a lot of intern stuff like driving people around. Part of my job was to befriend people and make the atmosphere more cohesive. Sometimes I planned dinners and trips but I wasn't very good at that. I was very charismatic and increasingly smart, and most importantly I was cheap. I was less cheap as a Fellow in the Berkeley apartments and accomplished less. I wrote and helped people occassionally. There weren't clear expectations for Fellows. Also people like Eliezer, who had power, never asked for any signs of accomplishment. Eliezer is also very bad at reading. Nonetheless I think I should have accomplished more somehow, e.g. gotten experience writing papers from scratch.
I believe I almost always turned down credit for contributions to papers, but I didn't make too many substantive contributions; I did a fair bit of editing, which I'm good at.
You could get a decent idea by looking at what the average Visiting Fellow did, then remember that I often couldn't remember things I did -- cognitive quirk -- and that I tried to avoid credit when possible at least half the time.
You were good at that, as I recall. As was (especially) Alicorn. Also, at the time I thought it was just super-cool that SI had its mundane tasks done by such brilliant people.
:D
I wish you would write like this all the time.
Second
Thanks for the summary.
That's interesting. I also have something like that. It extends to not being able to remember names, and not being able to easily come up with specific examples. Is it like that for you?
Yes, also for Eliezer.
Do you know of any helpful strategies for dealing with this or get better?
For Eliezer & I it seems there's also the matter of not being able to find objects amongst other objects. Eliezer hasn't quite said he's bad at that but I surmised it from one of his most terrible posts, ha. For that issue, I've learned to just use explicit, conscious linear search. Still terrible, but not as terrible.
With episodic memory I suspect there are similar strategies for looking through mental objects, likely in temporal order. Potentially similarly with names. I can't think of anything that would work for specific examples in general though, which as you know is really quite a big problem during arguments and so on.
I mildly suspect the problem has somewhat to do with damage to or atrophy of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. But that's speculation, and there are a lot of selection effects on who shows up on LessWrong, so it might be a somewhat rare combination of stuff. Eliezer would know a lot more about the neurology and so on but he's probably not available for questioning and speculation on the matter.
For what it's worth I'm somewhat schizotypal/schizoaffective, and Eliezer also seems to lean that way.
It may or may not be relevant, but finding objects amongst other objects was one of the functions that was severely degraded by my stroke. As with most other damaged functions, I found that actually forcing myself to do it anyway (which usually required first learning a new way to frame the doing of it) led to very rapid improvement back to more-or-less baseline. The improvement plateaued out thereafter. (Unsurprisingly, but disappointingly. The experience of such rapid improvement is very heady stuff.)
If you don't mind sharing, what parts of the brain or other cognitive functions were most damaged by the stroke? I've pieced together some of the story but not much.
The aneurysm itself was at the edge of my thalamus. The resulting swelling caused damage kind of all over the place.
The functional damage at first was pretty severe, but I don't remember specifics; I mostly don't remember that week at all and much of what I do remember I'm fairly certain didn't actually happen. I spent it in an ICU. I come back to a coherent narrative about a week later; at that point, the bulk of the functional damage was general pain and fatigue, right-side hemiplegia (my right arm and leg were not quite paralyzed, but I lost control over them), mild aphasia which most often manifested as anomia (difficulty retrieving words) and occasionally in other ways (I remember losing the ability to conjugate sentences for a few hours; that was freaky), and (most significantly) a loss of short-term memory with all the associated knock-on effects to various kinds of cognitive processing.
There was also a lot of concern at various points that there may have been damage to my emotional centers. I never noticed any such effect, but, well, I wasn't necessarily the most reliable witness. Most memorably, this led to one doctor asking me if I my emotional state was at all unusual. I didn't reply "What the fuck kind of a stupid question is that, I just had a fucking stroke, of course my emotional state is fucking unusual you inbred moron!!!" although I really wanted to. I instead replied "I'm pretty sure my unusual emotional states are situational, not organic." Ultimately they started believing me.