All of gianlucatruda's Comments + Replies

The perspective of the black-box AI could make for a great piece of fiction. I'd love to write a sci-fi short and explore that concept someday!

The point of your post (as I took it) is that it takes only a little creativity to come up with ways an intelligent black-box could covertly "unbox" itself, given repeated queries. Imagining oneself as the black-box makes it far easier to generate ideas for how to do that. An extended version of your scenario could be both entertaining and thought-provoking to read.

I somehow missed all notifications of your reply and just stumbled upon it by chance when sharing this post with someone. 

I had something very similar with my calibration results, only it was for 65% estimates:

 

I think your hypotheses 1 and 2 match with my intuitions about why this pattern emerges on a test like this. Personally, I feel like a combination of 1 and 2 is responsible for my "blip" at 65%. 

I'm also systematically under-confident here — that's because I cut my prediction teeth getting black swanned during 2020, so I tend to leave... (read more)

This is a superb summary! I'll definitely be returning to this as a cheatsheet for the core ideas from the book in future. I've also linked to it in my review on Goodreads.

it's straightforwardly the #1 book you should use when you want to recruit new people to EA. [...] For rationalists, I think the best intro resource is still HPMoR or R:AZ, but I think Scout Mindset is a great supplement to those, and probably a better starting point for people who prefer Julia's writing style over Eliezer's.

Hmm... I've had great success with the HPMOR / R:AZ route for c... (read more)

6Dweomite
I tried the calibration exercise you linked.  Skipped one question where I felt I just had no basis at all for answering, but answered all the rest, even when I felt very unsure. When I said 95% confident, my accuracy was 100% (9/9) When I said 85% confident, my accuracy was 83% (5/6) When I said 75% confident, my accuracy was 71% (5/7) When I said 65% confident, my accuracy was 60% (3/5) At a glance, that looks like it's within rounding error of perfect. So I was feeling pretty good about my calibration, until... When I said 55% confident, my accuracy was 92% (11/12) I, er, uh...what?  How can I be well-calibrated at every other confidence level and then get over 90% right when I think I'm basically guessing? Null Hypothesis: Random fluke?  Quick mental calculation says winning at least 11 out of 12 coin-flips would be p < .01.  Plus, this is a larger sample than any other confidence level, so if I'm not going to believe this, I probably shouldn't believe any of the other results, either. (Of course, from your perspective, I'm the one person out of who-knows-how-many test takers that got a weird result and self-selected to write a post about it.  But from my perspective it seems pretty surprising.) Hypothesis #1:  There are certain subject areas where I feel like I know stuff, and other subject areas where I feel like I don't know stuff, and I'm slightly over-confident in the former but drastically under-confident in the later. This seems likely true to some extent--I gave much less confidence overall in the "country populations" test section, but my actual accuracy there was about the same as other categories.  But I also said 55% twice in each of the other 3 test sections (and got all 6 of those correct), so it seems hard to draw a natural subject-area boundary that would fully explain the results. Hypothesis #2:  When I believe I don't have any "real" knowledge, I switch mental gears to using a set of heuristics that turns out to be weirdly effective, a
4Rob Bensinger
Yeah, I listened to the audiobook and thought it was great.

I present to you VQGANCLIP's take on a Bob Ross painting of Bob Ross painting Bob Ross paintings 😂 This surpassed my wildest expectations!

I don't feel like it's the kind of polished thing I'd put on LW. But here it is on my blog: gianlucatruda.com/blog/2021/07/08/wisdom.html

1Aaron Bergman
Thanks!

One decent way of engineering an authentic 1-1 conversation is to go through a bunch of personal and vulnerability-inducing questions together, a la 36 Questions that Lead in Love (after cutting the ⅔ of questions that I found dull). So I made a list of questions I considered interesting, which I expected to lead to authentic and vulnerable conversations.

This is a fascinating strategy and I'm surprised it worked so well. The linked article for the list of questions is paywalled (and NYT). 

After a bit of digging, this seems to be the original study for... (read more)

9Neel Nanda
Ah, I didn't notice the paywall. Thanks for collecting those! I also like Spencer Greenberg's Life-Changing Questions and Askhole (again, most of these are unsuitable, but there are some gems in there)
1Peter Brown
Any chance you could send it to me as well?
1Sunny from QAD
May I see it too?  Asking because the post above advised me to purchase cheap chances at huge upsides and this seems like one of those ^^

Okay, I absolutely love this post! In fact, if you were to break it down into three posts, I would probably have been a serious fan of all of them individually. 

Firstly, the expected utility formulation of lateness is excellent and explains a lot of my personal behaviour. I'm aggressively early for important events like client meetings and interviews, but consistently tardy when meeting for coffee or arriving for a lecture. Whilst your methodology focussed on unobservable shifts to the time axis, I suspect there are also interesting gains to be made i... (read more)

Was about to comment the same thing. Saving it to my Wisdom List.

UPDATE: I've published the list here: https://gianlucatruda.com/blog/2021/07/08/wisdom.html

1Aaron Bergman
Would you be willing to post this as a general post on the main forum? I think lots of people including myself would appreciate!
6Mark Xu
I'd be interested to see the rest of this list, if you're willing to share.

Most rationalists are heavily invested into AGI in non-monetary ways — career paths, free time, hopes for longevity/coordination breakthroughs. As other commenters have pointed out, if humanity achieves aligned AGI in the future, financial returns will feasibly be far less important. Given that, maybe the best investments are to bet against AGI as a hedge for humanity not achieving it. 

There are 3 futures: If we achieve aligned AGI, we win the game and nothing else matters*. If we achieve misaligned AGI, we die and nothing else matters. If we fail to ... (read more)

3TekhneMakre
Some people think that there will be something reasonably described as a singularity, but that money (or more generally property rights) will still plausibly matter. Even if you don't think that, we might be able to predict that the market will ignore any *other* possibility (such as a singularity that obsoletes money). So we can predict that the market will predict that certain stocks will be valuable. So we can get money just ahead of the singularity, and then maybe use it to avert bad outcomes. Or maybe not, but that's one way it might make sense to bet on AGI even if you're confident it will obsolete money.

which might happen in 1-2 years and tank crypto-mining completely.

Good point. But that would be a much better time to buy in for long-term value. 

One approach that feels a bit more direct is investing in semiconductor stocks.

I agree with this and the above points. 

One way to potentially overcome the issues with TSMC might be to supplement the investment by buying into commodities like silicon and coltan. This is still not guaranteed to capture most of the value, but might be a method of diversification. But there are many ethical considerations (particularly with coltan). 

Yes! Even many websites and web apps implement some Vim standards. Particularly \ for search. 

This is a superb overview! I've used Vim for about 2 years now, but I still learned a bunch of things from this post that I didn't pick up from other cheatsheets or articles. 

My 2-cents: Vim itself is powerful as an editor, but I always missed some IDE features. What I've come to realise is that the real power of Vim is not the editor, but the keybindings. I installed the Vim extension in VSCode some time ago and have loved the hybrid workflow. Since then, I've been gradually incorporating Vim keybindings into all the tools I use for text — like Overl... (read more)

3lsusr
I'm in the same boat. I do most of my text editing in Spacemacs with Vim keybindings. Please let me know if you figure out a good in-browser text entry solution.
8ConCave
I have to agree with this. Having one set of keybindings that you can take with you to most editors is something that really adds to the value of learning vim. I learned Sublime Text's shortcuts, then IntelliJ's shortcuts, which required a separate retraining. Learning vim required retraining again, but now I can bring that effort with me to new editing environments.

There will be a Sequences Discussion Club event to talk about this post. Join us on Clubhouse tonight for a ~1h discussion. https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PQRv1RoA

If you listen from 31:54 (linked here) to 46:00, Lex articulates very nicely what's unique and interesting about Clubhouse and they discuss how it compares to Skinner-box social media. It's a nice summary of the underlying value and definitely echoes some of my experiences so far.

Try joining communities/clubs on topics you’re interested in. Then any rooms started by their members should pop up in your lobby. Also, I’ve heard that following people you’re interested in helps improve the suggestions.

I'd love to do that sometime (timezones permitting). I'm @gianlucatruda on Clubhouse. 

Great summary! For those reading the comments, there is a growing Rationalist-oriented community on Clubhouse. Join here: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/rationality-live

Update: I tried searching again now and it pops up when I search “rationality” now. Seems it just took a while to update.

1CraigMichael
I found it right away. We should schedule a discussion!

Seems that there isn't yet a robust way to share these new communities (that I've found). But I'm glad you're finally in. Looking forward to some future conversations! 

I don't think it's you. These in-app communities are a brand new feature, so I suspect it's still a bit buggy. Thanks for letting me know. 

Try visit this event link from your phone and then tap on the club name. Does that work? 

I'll also try invite you directly from the app. 

3lsusr
I opened the event link in Safari. The event details appeared along with an "Open in app" link in the upper right corner. But when I click the "Open in app" link it doesn't open the app. However, I did receive the invite you sent directly to me. The invite did work. Thank you!

Agreed. They're working on Android at the moment. I should have made all that clear in the post. 

I just discovered this now, Zvi. It's such a great heuristic!


I whipped up an interactive calculator version in Desmos for my own future reference, but others might find it useful too: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/pf74qjhzuk

Apologies for the late reply. Thanks for your kind words and support!

My Replacing Guilt output has been very low lately, but I'll have some more time flexibility in the near future and will start making progress again.

Thanks for compiling the series like this. I really appreciated being able to read it on my Kindle!

To help make Nate's ideas even more accessible, I'm currently producing an audio version. It can be found at https://anchor.fm/guilt or by searching "Replacing Guilt Podcast" on all podcast platforms. I intend to make a single audiobook out of it at the end too*.

If you know of people who would benefit from Replacing Guilt, but primarily consume audio instead of reading, please do forward it their way.


*All with Nate's permission, of course

7RainbowSpacedancer
Thanks for this podcast! I'm one of those people that primarily consume audio. Wanted to offer some encouragement, production quality definitely surpassed my expectations. Pleasure to listen to.

No, to be clear, what I interpreted of your post was that you are "prescribing" how much time should be spent. "Predicting" how much time you will spend on something is not particularly helpful in achieving any output results, especially if it's largely just repeating what you did before. Your response does help in that it clarifies what you have done. It's just not what I thought you had done. In my experience, a "prescription" -- a plan for what you must do to achieve some valuable outcome -- is of more use in sel... (read more)

Could you elaborate on how exactly you went from a collection of data to a prescription of how much time you should spend on each task?

1Лu Лinveгa
Do you mean a "prediction of how much time I should spend on each task"? If so, yes, I basically calculate the recent average spent on each task, and find the offset against the past few days. It gives me a list of tasks which I can sort and get the next task that has the highest chance of being what I should be doing the next day. I run this for a number of day, always appending the forecasted task, and so I get a short term forecast of the next 14 days or so.

Great post and helpful synthesis of the difference in procedural- and declarative- directed approaches. The matrix multiplication example earns a 10/10 too. I trust the exams went well!