FOOM Articles

3 fowlertm 05 March 2015 09:32PM

I'd like recommendations for articles dealing with slow and hard takeoff scenarios. I already found Yudkowsky's post 'hard takeoff', I know 'Superintelligence' has a section on it, and I think the Yudkowsky/Hanson debate mostly dealt with it.

Is there anything else?

Comments (4)
Comment author: PhilGoetz 21 February 2015 12:10:12AM 1 point [-]

I disagree. Masculinity is an especially important and problematic set of values.

Comment author: fowlertm 21 February 2015 03:48:19PM 1 point [-]

Why? What's wrong with wanting to be masculine?

Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 20 February 2015 03:09:32AM 2 points [-]

"Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation."

Isaac Levi one of the founders of formal epistemology does something similar called "Mild Contractions". From the title of one of his books

"Mild Contraction: Evaluating Loss of Information Due to Loss of Belief". His epistemology constructed from decision theory is very advanced if not the most advanced.

http://www.amazon.com/Mild-Contraction-Evaluating-Information-Belief-ebook/dp/B00DZO8P4G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424401748&sr=1-1&keywords=mild+contraction

Comment author: fowlertm 21 February 2015 03:30:55PM *  1 point [-]

Interesting tie-in, thanks.

Incidentally, how cool would it be to be able to say "my epistemology is the most advanced"? If nothing else it'd probably be a great pickup line at LW meetups.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 04 February 2015 01:34:02AM 0 points [-]

I suffer from mild Carpal Tunnel (or something masquerading as CT) which makes progress in programming slow. When I feel down about this fact I imagine how hard programming would be without hands.

This book solved my crippling carpal tunnel syndrome, FWIW.

Comment author: fowlertm 04 February 2015 04:39:41AM 0 points [-]

It's worth a lot, I'll look into it.

Intrapersonal comparisons: you might be doing it wrong.

16 fowlertm 03 February 2015 09:34PM

Cross-posted

Nothing weighty or profound today, but I noticed a failure mode in myself which other people might plausibly suffer from so I thought I'd share it.

Basically, I noticed that sometimes when I discovered a more effective way of doing something -- say, going from conventional flashcards to Anki -- I found myself getting discouraged.

I realized that it was because each time I found such a technique, I automatically compared my current self to a version of me that had had access to the technique the whole time. Realizing that I wasn't as far along as I could've been resulted in a net loss of motivation. 

Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation.

A variant of this exercise is taking any handicap you might have and wildly exaggerating it. I suffer from mild Carpal Tunnel (or something masquerading as CT) which makes progress in programming slow. When I feel down about this fact I imagine how hard programming would be without hands.

Sometimes I go as far as to plan out what I might do if I woke up tomorrow with a burning desire to program and nothing past my wrists. Well, I'd probably figure out a way to code by voice and then practice mnemonics because I wouldn't be able to write anything down. Since these solutions exist I can implement one or both of them the moment my carpal tunnel gets bad enough.

With this realization comes a boost in motivation knowing I can go a different direction if required. 

Comments (10)
Comment author: LawrenceC 01 February 2015 05:45:36PM *  1 point [-]

I tried making one just for the math behind rationality/decision theory back in October, but I never got around to finishing it. The main problems I ran into were:

  • Where should the skill tree start? I'm sure that basic math like algebra, geometry, trig, etc are all really useful, but I'm not sure about the dependencies between them. I ended up lumping them all into "basic mathematics".

  • How should the skill tree split subjects? Many subjects are best learned iteratively - for example, it's probably best to get a rudimentary understanding of probability theory, then learn more probability theory later on once you've picked up other related subjects (Linear Algebra, Multivariate Calculus, etc) and then again after more subjects (Measure theory). The complication is that these other subjects are often split into different "levels". I found that I didn't have enough familiarity with math to split subjects naturally.

One method that seems promising is taking a bunch of textbooks/courses, and trying to figure out the dependencies between them.

Comment author: fowlertm 03 February 2015 05:28:36PM 1 point [-]

Agreed. I think in light of the fact that a lot of this stuff is learned iteratively you'd want to unpack 'basic mathematics'. I'm not sure of the best way to graphically represent iterative learning, but maybe you could have arrows going back to certain subjects, or you could have 'statistics round II' as one of nodes in the network.

It seems like insights are what you're really aiming at, so maybe instead of 'probability theory' you have a node for 'distributions' and 'variance' at some early point in the tree then later you have 'Bayesian v. Frequentist reasoning'.

This would help also help you unpack basic mathematics, though I don't know much about the dependencies either. I hope too, soon :)

Comment author: imuli 30 January 2015 06:38:24PM 2 points [-]

There is a dependency tree for Eliezer Yudkowsky's early posts. It's not terribly pretty, but with a couple hours and a decent data presentation toolkit someone could probably make a pretty graphical version. It doesn't include a lot of later contributions by other people, but it'd be a start.

Comment author: fowlertm 31 January 2015 02:27:21PM 0 points [-]

I thought of that as well, it does need some work done in terms of presentation. It'd be a good place to start, yes.

Is there a rationalist skill tree yet?

15 fowlertm 30 January 2015 04:02PM

A while back I came across a delightful web developer skill tree, and I was wondering if technical rationality has gotten to the point where someone could make one of these for an aspiring rationalist.

I think seeing a clear progression from beginning skills to advanced ones laid out graphically helps those starting on the path conceptualize the process. 

Comments (14)

LW-ish meetup in Boulder, CO

5 fowlertm 13 January 2015 05:23AM

This Saturday I'm giving a presentation at the Boulder Future Salon, topic will be non-religious spirituality. The more LWians that can make it the better, because I'm really trying to get some community building done in the Boulder/Denver area. There's an insane amount of potential here.

Details.

Comments (0)
Comment author: Princess_Stargirl 08 January 2015 02:28:53PM 10 points [-]

Having done a math PHD and now working as a programmer I find math proofs and programming semi-similar. Though I think programming is less "relaxing." In mathematics if you have an argument that works and isn't insanely complicated you can call yourself victorious. You can look for a simpler method if you want but there is really no imperative to do so. In programming there is almost always a better way to solve a given problem and the differences in speed matter alot.

Comment author: fowlertm 12 January 2015 04:35:52PM 3 points [-]

My two cents: I studied math pretty intensively on my own and later started programming. To my pleasant surprise, the thinking style involved in math transmitted almost directly over into programming. I'd imagine that the inverse is also true.

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