Raemon

LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.

Sequences

The Coordination Frontier
Privacy Practices
The LessWrong Review
Keep your beliefs cruxy and your frames explicit
LW Open Source Guide
Tensions in Truthseeking
Project Hufflepuff
Rational Ritual
Drawing Less Wrong

Comments

One note: custom levels now exist and you can go browse them directly even if you've beaten the game.

I do agree that this exercise, as-worded, probably nudges towards a flavor of "explicit thinking", which I don't think is even necessarily the best strategy for Baba is You overall.

I don't think this exercise necessarily says "think explicitly" – the section on metacognitive brainstorming is meant to fuzzy/experiential/"go-take-a-shower"/"meditate" style options.

It depends a lot on the musician and their skillset.

For me: I don't really speak fluent sheet music. When I write music, I do it entirely by ear. I record it. I have musicians listen to the record and imitate it by ear. Later on, if I want sheet music, I hire someone to listen to the record and transcribe it into sheet music after-the-fact, a process which costs like $200 per song (or, free, if I do it myself or get a volunteer, but it's a couple hours per song and there are like 30 songs so this is not a quick/easy volunteer process)

Some musicians "think primarily in sheet music", and then they would do it with sheet music from the get-go as part of the creation process. Some solstice songs already have sheet music for this reason.

I've paid money to transcribe ~3-5 solstice songs with sheet music so far.

Curated.

I've spent the past few weeks independently interested in this concept (before mesaoptimizer posted it, actually). I reread the Eliezer tweet while investigating "deliberate practice for solving Confusing Problems™"

I still have a lot of open questions on "how do you actually do this effectively?" and "how long does it take to pay off in 'you actually think faster?'". But I've at least transitioned from "I feel like there's no way I could have 'thought it faster'" to "I observe specific earlier moments where I failed to notice clues that could have pointed me at the right solution" and "I've identified skills I could have had that would have made it possible to identify and act on those clues."

I've personally gotten mileage from writing out in detail what my thought process was, and then writing out in detail "what's the shortest way I could imagine a superintelligence or someone 40 IQ points higher than me would have reliably done it?". The process currently takes me ~30 minutes.

A thing I haven't attempted yet is:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: See, if I'd noticed myself doing anything remotely like that, I'd go back, figure out which steps of thought were actually performing intrinsically necessary cognitive work, and then retrain myself to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds.

I'm interested in other people trying this and seeing if useful stuff falls out.

We do not currently have sheet music for most songs. It’s also extra labor to arrange the slides (though this isn’t that big a part of the problem)

This plus “also it’s a lot more work to setup” are my own main cruxes. (If either were false I’d consider it much more strongly).

Yeah I do not super stand by how I phrased it in the post. But also your second paragraph feels wrong to me too – in some sense yes Chess and Slay the Spire hidden information are "the same", but, like, it seems at least somewhat important that in Slay the Spire there are things you can't predict by purely running simulations forward, you have to have a probability distribution over pretty unknown things.

(I'm not sure I'll stand by either this or my last comment, either. I'm thinking out loud, and may have phrased things wrong here)

(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I'm unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)

I think one thing I meant in the OP was more about "the player can choose to spend more time modeling the situation." Is it worth spending an extra 15 minutes thinking about how the longterm game might play out, and what concerns you may run into that you aren't currently modeling? I dunno! Depends on how much better you become at playing the game, by spending those 15 minutes.

This is maybe a nonstandard use of "value of information", but I think it counts.

Seems big if true and fairly plausible. I'd be interested in chipping in to pay for someone to come up with a methodology for investing this more and then running at it if the methodology seemed good.

(also it's occurring to me it'd be cool to have a "Dollars!/Unit of Caring" react)

I'm not mesaoptimizer, but, fyi my case is "I totally didn't find IFS type stuff very useful for years, and the one day I just suddenly needed it, or at least found myself shaped very differently such that it felt promising." (see My "2.9 trauma limit")

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