I wrote about my experience with Canada (instant permanent residency) - https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/canadas-express-entry-program/. Worth noting that so far this year they haven't offered any places in the regular program - https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/mandate/policies-operational-instructions-agreements/ministerial-instructions/express-entry-rounds.html.
Wesley Aptekar-Cassel wrote about his experience with Taiwan (very quick renenewable work visa) - https://notebook.wesleyac.com/taiwan-gold-card/
You can use leechblock to add time restrictions for any site.
It also has the option to add loading delays to sites, which I find useful for sites which I can't afford to block outright.
I've seen some authors use 'subjective experience' for the former and reserve consciousness for the latter. Unfortunately consciousness is one of those words, like 'intelligence', that everyone wants a piece of, so maybe it would be useful to have a specific term for the latter too. 'Reflective awareness' sounds about right, but after some quick googling it looks like that term has already been claimed for something else.
Uncontrolled argues along similar lines - that the physics/chemistry model of science, where we get to generalize a compact universal theory from a number of small experiments, is simply not applicable to biology/psychology/sociology/economics and that policy-makers should instead rely more on widespread, continuous experiments in real environments to generate many localized partial theories.
A prototypical argument is the paradox-of-choice jam experiment, which has since become solidified in pop psychology. But actual supermarkets run many 1000s of in-situ...
Uncontrolled argues along similar lines - that the physics/chemistry model of science, where we get to generalize a compact universal theory from a number of small experiments, is simply not applicable to biology/psychology/sociology/economics and that policy-makers should instead rely more on widespread, continuous experiments in real environments to generate many localized partial theories.
I'll note that (non-extreme) versions of this position are consistent with ideas like "it's possible to build non-opaque AGI systems." The full ans...
life is sufficiently hard as it is. We don't need to make it any harder than it has to be.
It seems like Kierkegaard could distinguish between kinds of difficulties. It feels good to deliberately challenge yourself. It doesn't feel good to fight to avoid snapping at your partner because you're hangry because you forgot to go shopping.
Maybe some difficulties are challenges to overcome and some are just friction to avoid.
TAPs seem to last about a week for me without some other regular reinforcement mechanism.
For a few weeks I've been writing them down in a text file. I read and rehearse them every morning over coffee, and just before I go to bed I look through them and reflect on whether I missed any triggers. It fits into journal habits that I already had so the inconvenience is quite low. So far I've been noticing triggers at a higher rate, but it's still in the novelty phase.
My mind is already spinning excuses on overdrive.
As a teenager I spent 7 years in military school. They adopted the army ethos that if something under your responsibility goes wrong, you get punished. Regardless of whether you could have done anything about it. Trying to produce excuses usually led to being cut off with "I don't care" followed by increasing the punishment.
This had an interesting effect - if you know you are going to be punished regardless of excuses, you stop thinking about excuses and start trying to head off problems. It's ...
This post is rekindling my urge to run away and live on a boat :)
I'd propose that another aspect of the steampunk aesthetic is uniqueness - a rebellion against the era of mass production. You don't live in a standard Mark II Apple iBoat, you live in a constantly changing hand-built ship-of-Theseus that only you could ever understand or operate.
In that aspect at least, Linux has steampunkish tendencies. You may start with a standard distro, but over time it becomes a web of shell scripts and homebuilt jury-rigged tools, until you reach the point ...
Yeah, part of the point of this post was to highlight that Steampunk and Linux share a lot of commonalities (of the sort you describe here), and the main difference is that Steampunk involves more physicality.
until you reach the point where someone asks if they can use your laptop and you are forced to reply in all honesty "probably not".
I lol'd
Agreed. 'Rest in bed as much as possible but grudgingly take the actions needed to stay alive' sounds a lot like depression, but there exist non-depressed people who need explaining.
I wonder if the conversion from mathematics to language is causing problems somewhere. The prose description you are working with is 'take actions that minimize prediction error' but the actual model is 'take actions that minimize a complicated construct called free energy'. Sitting in a dark room certainly works for the former but I don't kno...
>I wonder if the conversion from mathematics to language is causing problems somewhere. The prose description you are working with is 'take actions that minimize prediction error' but the actual model is 'take actions that minimize a complicated construct called free energy'. Sitting in a dark room certainly works for the former but I don't know how to calculate it for the latter.
There's absolutely trouble here. "Minimizing surprise" always means, to Friston, minimizing sensory surprise under a generative m...
,,That was much more informative than most of the papers. Did you learn this by parsing the papers or from another better source?
Honestly, I've just had to go back and forth banging my head on Friston's free-energy papers, non-Friston free-energy papers, and the ordinary variational inference literature -- for the past two years, prior to which I spent three years banging my head on the Josh Tenenbaum-y computational cog-sci literature and got used to seeing probabilistic models of cognition.
I'm now really fucking glad to be in a PhD program where I can actually use that knowledge.
Oh, and btw, everyone at MIRI was exactly as confused as Scott is when I presented a bunch of free-energy stuff to them last March.
(Posting here rather than SSC because I wrote the whole comment in markdown before remembering that SSC doesn't support it).
We had a guest lecture from Friston last year and I cornered him afterwards to try to get some enlightenment (notes here). I also spent the next few days working through the literature, using a multi-armed bandit bandit as a concrete problem (notes here ).
Very few of the papers have concrete examples. Those that do often skip important parts of the math and use inconsistent/ambiguous notation. He doesn't seem to have releas...
The various papers don't all even implement the same model - the free energy principle seems to be more a design principle than a specific model.`
Bingo. Friston trained as a physicist, and he wants the free-energy principle to be more like a physical law than a computer program. You can write basically any computer program that implements or supports variational inference, throw in some action states as variational parameters, and you've "implemented" the free-energy principle _in some way_.
Overall, the Principle is more of a dom...
I didn't see the post itself, but it sounds like Unconscious Thought Theory. The experimental evidence is pretty weak, and imo the theory as it stands is just too poorly specified to really test experimentally.
There is some evidence that offline processing matters for eg motor learning or statistical learning. I haven't looked in enough detail to know whether to trust it or not.
A friend from Singapore did Express Entry and only took three months. Mine appears to have been longer because the London embassy was in the middle of moving buildings. When I went in for my biometrics it was total chaos - they didn't even have a regular camera setup yet so they tried taking pictures in three different rooms. Then after they approved it they kept failing to actually send the approval paperwork. But it seems like normally the process is pretty fast.
I hear that if you live in, say, India then getting things like police certificates is a lot more expensive and can take a long time.