Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Vladimir_Golovin 15 May 2009 07:06PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 15 May 2009 08:11:24PM *  33 points [-]

Mine is a weird one: I started taking every other day off. Even as deadlines loom, I am committed to doing no work today. I can cook and read and surf the Internet and hang out on Less Wrong and chat with friends and take a nap and do art (but not art for my webcomic), but at all costs I will do no work. Tomorrow, I will do work (in my case, papers for school and art for my webcomic and editing some fiction), and unless something breaks the trend that's been working nicely for a week and a half now, I will do more work than I could have expected to do in three or four days before I started this. (I make exceptions for time-dependent things like class meetings.)

I have a few hypotheses for why this works for me:

  • It prevents the low-level burnout that used to plague me. I can decompress from whatever heavy mental lifting I do regularly and for a large chunk of time.
  • I actually enjoy most of my work when I actually do it, so obliging myself not to do it lets me get through the akratic aversion during my downtime. By the time I wake up on my work day, I've worked up a fair amount of antsiness about wanting to do something productive. Also, my creative ideas accumulate over time, not over effort; I have more interesting work-related ideas by the time I fire up Word when I've set the project aside for a day.
  • I can goof off more efficiently. Instead of spending all day on Stumbleupon because I can keep telling myself "one more site and then really, I'll do something", I can read an entire novel or bake a cheesecake or watch half a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These things require significant time commitments, so if I feel like I ought to be working I don't do them, but when I do them, they are more relaxing than the same amount of time in two-minute bursts spent obsessively refreshing Google Reader or checking my website stats or bothering people on IM.
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 May 2009 08:57:49PM 3 points [-]

I had to take every other day off during the year I was able to work on AI with Marcello.

Comment author: Alicorn 15 May 2009 09:00:51PM 2 points [-]

Had to? Why had to?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 May 2009 11:29:11PM 6 points [-]

My actual AI work is extremely hard mental work, harder even than writing, which Harlan Ellison once called the toughest labor he ever performed (way harder than being e.g. a truck driver, which I myself have never done). There was no way I could do it two days in a row - though you'll note that I say 'was' not 'is' since it's important to keep in mind that these things often change over time.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 May 2009 12:15:01AM 3 points [-]

I can attest to that; programming is complex because you formalize solving a problem over just solving it. AI is doubly complex because you're formalizing how to do that.

Comment author: JGWeissman 16 May 2009 01:02:31AM 2 points [-]

AI is way more than twice as complex as ordinary programming. I have written plenty of programs that write programs, dealing with two layers of formalizing solutions, that is not anywhere near AGI. For one thing these programs only generate a certain class of programs. And much more importantly, they are not more powerful than I am so I can actually detect mistakes and fix them after I execute them.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 May 2009 01:15:43AM 8 points [-]

Meh. AI conceptual work can be hard. But in reality, on any programming project where you're both the brains and the brawn, you're going to spend 90% of your time doing stupid stuff like writing hundreds of boring little subroutines; investigating different libraries, data sources, and data standards; figuring out which database software gives you the best performance; profiling and optimizing SQL queries; and of course DEBUGGING.

Not that my programs ever have bugs, of course.

Comment author: matt 19 May 2009 11:07:37AM 4 points [-]

If I had to guess, I'd guess that you're spending your time in Java or C (++|#) :)

Comment deleted 16 May 2009 02:34:06AM [-]
Comment author: JGWeissman 16 May 2009 04:20:07AM 17 points [-]

That does not really mean anything.

"Exponential" refers to how a quantity relates to another. For example, we would say that (until environmental limits are encountered) a population's size is exponential with respect to time, and mean, that there is an initial population size P0 at a time t0, and a doubling time T, such that the population at a given time, P(t) = P0 * 2^((t - t0)/T). In computer science, we might say that the time or memory requirement of an algorithm is exponential with respect to the size of a list, or the number of nodes or edges in a graph, which could be represented by a similar equation, assigning different meanings to the variables. (Often, we really the mean the equation to be an approximation, or an upper or lower bound on the actual quantity.)

But if you say that designing and programming an AI is exponentially hard, you have not identified a variable of the problem that is analogous to the time in population growth. "Exponential" is not a vague superlative, it has a precise meaning. If all you mean to say is that AI is much harder than conventional programming, then just say that. Yes it is vague, but that is better than having your communication be more precise than your understanding.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 May 2009 10:06:18PM 14 points [-]

Targeted commenter doesn't really deserve being hit that hard, but voted up anyway.

The thing I really despise is when people use "exponential" as a superlative to describe fast-growing quantifiable processes that are not known to be exponential.