Orson Welles bemoaned how the explosion in his adaptation of the Trial could interpreted as an allusion to a nuclear explosion - "because I hate symbolism". He explained they tried all afternoon to film an explosion that wasn't mushroomy and failed, he finally relented "all right, there's going to be symbolism". While the Trial was shot in France, I don't have to hand where the second unit explosion photography was done and the ambient humidity there...
(I checked, the explosion at the start of Touch of Evil isn't really an explosion: it cuts to a flaming car chassis bumping down on the ground, follow by a crash zoom)
1I largely disagree.
Disagree with which bits precisely?
I think, to use your taxonomy, I'm trying to formularize how to produce types 2b and 3. Take the note - "Castle Bryant Johnston are the firm that did the opening titles of Cheers". To you this might seem like a type 1 note - it's a "who did what" statement. But actually it's probably closer to type 3 in that it points to a implicit vague goal I have about appropriating the film grammar and design language used in opening title sequences of both films and television shows, which is a highly compressed and efficient form of storytelling, and making self-contained stories with it.
A way of distilling it might be:
Learn interesting thing -> think about kind/type of event/decision this is useful for -> think about specific instance this would be useful for (or three) in explicit detail -> write that down
What I'd need to do to improve my notetaking (and tell me if this is wrong) is go a step further rather than say "this vaguely points towards this goal". I should stop, brain storm exactly which techniques from, say the still-photographs chronological progression of Cheers, or the family dynamics in a single shot from Rosanne and how I might build a self-contained story about that. Not just saying "it would be cool to do something based on that" but actively writing down what might be a candidate to apply those techniques. Coming up with a story, even if it's as simple as "girl meets boy, from wrong side of the tracks" "kind died, queen died of grief". Because again, now I'm leaving less work for future me.
If I learn about some cool new FFMPEG ability, "oh wow, I can make a carousel with this commandline, that's cool" - I should stop - and think about what kinds of video content I would want to stack horizontally and scroll. Why? What content would suit it? I should have a provisional answer. This increases the chances of me using that note.
Another source of utility here is preserving information about "paths not taken". When working on some theoretical problem, you may end up adopting some very promising-seeming assumption and running with it. After a while, that assumption would be baked into your model of the problem so deeply it might be difficult to imagine a world without it – which would be lethal if the assumption was wrong. Seems important to explicitly keep track of it, in a format that isn't as corruptible as your brain.
Yep, hard agree.
Except, annoyingly, I often find myself with the inverse. My baked-in assumptions are correct (or at least, right within the specific way I've chosen to do something - Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem - every complex system is always in a failure but some components are compensating for it). I've erected Chesterton's Fence and forget why I did and quickly remember why with disastrous results.
More potential importance. Consider high entropy clauses ranging from total gibberish or jargon which, aside from revealing some information about the author/narrator, doesn't substantially change the content communicated:
This morning I opened the door and saw Aslan
This sounds incredible at first, but the underwhelming context is that they have named their domestic cat "Aslan". Is it important to know that the narrator knows the cat on a first name basis, and that this cat (who may or may not be owned by the narrator) is owned by someone with a sense of humor, a taste for ironic 'antonomasia' who has at the very least watched the Chronicle of Narnia films?
Not all surprising parts of a sentence are important.
You might also be interested in James Pennebaker research into function words - this doesn't apply to LLMs I would assume - but he found that doing statistical analysis on the seemingly least important words in English: couplas, pronouns etc. etc. they could predict the amount of medical visits of students. When you remember that the most commonly used, and therefore functional words, tend to be the shortest in a language following a Zipf Law: I, we, of, to, the, yes, no... this makes sense. What Pennebaker's research has revealed is that even these choices can reveal a lot about the status and mental health of the author.
I'm not sure I understand how cults are examples of taking an idea seriously, surely a cult is a complex of ideas - not any single one, some of which one can take seriously and others not so (in relgions there's debates about Hyperdispensationalism and patripassianism which show that even within the complex of ideas, different ones can be taken seriously. Not to mention a la carte Catholics and reformists ) - and that the chief mechanism by which people become subsumed into cults has nothing to do with reason or logical arguments but social support (or coercion) irrespective of the recruits belief?
The feedback loop is very different then and operates not on ideas but a whole host of different mechanisms. (Feelings of belonging, feelings of personal importance, no longer a need to 'search' or 'question' existential matters). These don't require ideas to be taken seriously at all.
Again, on the macro scale I can take seriously the idea of... I dunno... Lamarckism. But even if I seriously investigate it, give it the benefit of the doubt, I'm not really in a position to test it in the sense that it's a macro idea and not something whcih will affect my everyday routine (like Polyphasic sleeping). Even if I later on have children and try to change my behavior to elicit certain traits in those children, the lag time between when I can confirm it is many years.
it feels like arguments just being obviously very compelling, so you'll notice nothing wrong if it happens to you.
Does this only apply on the macroscale, say, ideas concerning ASI or Economic frameworks? Because it feels like if I take a very personal level idea seriously, let's take polyphasic sleeping. If I take it seriously and implement it - sure I won't get thrown into the East River but I should notice if something wrong happens to me, and rather quickly.
Solution really seems to be: tight feedback loops?
Great post, at least for a non-statistics-literate person like me. The Scots-Irish example (in spite of Arran McCutcheon's nitpick, which I'm all here for) makes concrete why this phenomenon is happening. The lizardman's constant shows up again?
There's another approach that has experimented with something similar:
https://hanlab.mit.edu/blog/streamingllm
We found models dump massive attention onto the first few tokens as "attention sinks"—places to park unused attention since softmax requires weights to sum to 1. Our solution, StreamingLLM, simply keeps these first 4 tokens permanently while sliding the window for everything else, enabling stable processing of 4 million+ tokens instead of just thousands.
Works both ways - how likeable you are can influence your status. But status tends to create a halo effect that amplifies how likable you are. But "likable" is a concert of traits anyway. For example, the Big 5 personality model has dimensions for "agreeableness" and "extroversion". However physical attractiveness (which can be modulated by things like choice of apparel and accessories) is another influence. You may disagree, but I think they could all be factors in what makes someone likable.
Narcissist people, who I would assume rate low on agreeableness but high on extroversion, actively seek and frequently do attain higher status because they are motivated to. Supply negotiators are less effective if they are more agreeable - this would impede their upwards mobility, and thus professional status. Men are particularly vulnerable to being agreeable, agreeable men tend to earn less.
High status people aren't necessarily there because they're likable - they could be ruthless for example, and being likable doesn't automatically make you high status, especially if you're an agreeable male.