Until very recently I thought it might be just me and that you people can calculate what you should do. But then I learnt that even important SI donors have similar problems. And other people as well.
The problem is that all the talk about approximations is complete handwaving and that you really can't calculate shit. And even if you could, there doesn't seem to be anything medium-probable that you could do about it.
‘Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”’
— Persi Diaconis, in The Problem of Thinking Too Much
No argument from me on any of that. I've said a couple of times on LW that I don't believe that people have or can have utility functions (I'm not alone on LW there), that approximating Solomonoff induction is impractical on at least an NP scale, and that large-world Bayesianism is tantamount to AGI, which nobody knows how to do. (Framing the AGI problem as LWB doesn't help solve AGI, it's an argument against expecting to succeed at LWB.)
But where does that leave us? What does one do instead?
To abandon "rationality" is to throw out the baby with ...
Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.