In Defense of the Shoggoth Analogy
In reply to: https://twitter.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1636599127902662658
The explanations in the thread seem to me to be missing the middle or evading the heart of the problem. Zoomed out: an optimization target at level of personality. Zoomed in: a circuit diagram of layers. But those layers with billions of weights are pretty much Turing complete.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has much idea how all those little learned computations are make up said personality. My suspicion is there isn't goi...
I know this post was chronologically first, but since I read them out of order my reaction was "wow, this post is sure using some of the notions from the Waluigi Effect mega-post, but for humans instead of chatbots"! In particular, they're both pointing at the notion that an agent (human or AI chatbot) can be in something like a superposition between good actor and bad actor unlike the naive two-tone picture of morality one often gets from children's books.
I interpreted OP as saying that KataGo, despite being a super-human Go player, came up with a flawed approximation to the natural abstraction that two eyed groups are alive which was inaccurate in some situations (and that's how it can be exploited by building a small living group that ends up appearing dead from its perspective).
One of my pet journalism peeves is the "as" (or sometimes "while") construction, which I often see in titles or first sentences of articles. It looks like "<event A was happening> as <event B was happening>". You can fact check the events and it'll turn out they happened, but the phrasing comes with this super annoying nudge-nudge-wink-wink-implication that the two events totally have direct causal connection. Unfortunately, you can't pin this on the journalist because they didn't actually say it.
This sort of thing happens a lot. To give just a...
I broadly agree. Though I would add that those things could still be (positive motivation) wants afterwards, which one pursues without needing them. I'm not advocating for asceticism.
Also, while I agree that you get more happiness by having fewer negative motives, being run by positive motives is not 100% happiness. One can still experience disappointment if one wants access to Netflix, and it's down for maintenance one day. However, disappointment is still both more hedonic than fear and promotes a more measured reaction to the situation.
Are you trying to say that it should work similarly to a desensitization therapy? But then, there might exist the reversed mode, where you get attached to things even more, as you meditate on why are they good to have. Which of these modes dominates is not clear to me.
I think you make a good point. I feel I was gesturing at something at something real when I wrote down the comparison notion, but didn't express it quite right. Here's how I would express it now:
The key thing I failed to point out in the post is that just visualizing a good thing ...
I don't think I get this. Doesn't this apply to any positive thing in life? (e.g. why single out the gratitude practise?)
I expect most positive things would indeed help somewhat, but that gratitude practice would help more. If someone lost a pet, giving them some ice cream may help. However, as long as their mind is still making the comparison to the world where their pet is still alive, the help may be limited. That said, to the extent that they manage to feel grateful for the ice cream, it seems to me as though their internal focus has shifted in a meaningful way, away from grasping at the world where their pet is still alive and towards the real world.
1. Yes, I agree with the synopsis (though expanded need-sets are not the only reason people are more anxious in the modern world).
2. Ah. Perhaps my language in the post wasn't as clear as it could have been. When I said:
More specifically, your need-set is the collection of things that have to seem true for you to feel either OK or better.
I was thinking of the needs as already being about what seems true about future states of the world, not just present states. For example, your need for drinking water is about being able to get water when thirsty...
Your seemingly target-less skill-building motive isn't necessarily irrational or non-awesome. My steel-man is that you're in a hibernation period, in which you're waiting for the best opportunity of some sort (romantic, or business, or career, or other) to show up so you can execute on it. Picking a goal to focus on really hard now might well be the wrong thing to do; you might miss a golden opportunity if your nose is at the grindstone. In such a situation a good strategy would, in fact, be to spend some time cultivating skills, and some...
"Aspiring Rationalist" Considered Harmful
The "aspiring" in "aspiring rationalist" seems like superfluous humility at best. Calling yourself a "rationalist" never implied perfection in the first place. It's just like how calling yourself a "guitarist" doesn't mean you think you're Jimi Hendrix. I think this analogy is a good one, because rationality is a human art, just like playing the guitar.
I suppose one might object that the word "rational" denotes a perfect standard, unlike p...
Well, I made another UserScript for the current site: https://github.com/mherreshoff/lw-antikibitzer
I agree with some of the other commenters that the term "decision theory" ought to be reserved for the overarching problem of which decision algorithm to use, and that the distinction you're referring to ought to be called something like "adversarial" vs "non-adversarial" or "rival" vs "non-rival". Nonetheless, I think this is an interesting handle for thinking about human psychology.
If we view these as two separate modes in humans, and presume that there's some kind of subsystem that decides whi...
In the link post you're referring to, what Scott actually says is:
I suspect this is true the way it’s commonly practiced and studied (“if you’re feeling down, listen to this mindfulness tape for five minutes a day!”), less true for more becoming-a-Buddhist-monk-level stuff.
Yes. Google docs does contain a lame version of the thing I'm pointing at. The right version is that the screen is split into N columns. Each column displays the children of the selection from the previous column (the selection could either be an entire post/comment or a span within the post/comment that the children are replies to.)
This is both a solution to inline comments and a tree-browser that lets you see just the ancestry of a comment at a glance with out having to manually collapse everything else.
Also: you replied to my comment and I didn&
If you want to encourage engagement, don't hide the new comment box all the way down at the bottom of the page! Put another one right after the post (or give the post a reply button of the same sort the comments have.)
One UI for this I could imagine (for non-mobile wide-screen use) is to have the post and the comments appear in two columns with the post on the left and the comments on the right (Similar to the Mac OS X Finder's column view.) Then when the user clicks on a comment the appropriate bit of the post would get highlighted.
In fact, I could see doing a similar thing for the individual comments themselves to create a view that would show the *ancestry* of a single comment, stretching left back to the post the conversation was originally about. This could
Agreed. Also, at some point Eigenkarma is going to need to include a recency bias so that the system can react quickly to a commenter going sour.
I agree with the spirit of this. That said, if the goal is to calculate a Karma score which fails to be fooled by a user posting a large amount of low quality content, it might be better to do something roughly: sum((P*x if x < 0 else max(0, x-T)) for x in post_and_comment_scores). Only comments that hit a certain bar should count at all. Here P is the penalty multiplier for creating bad content, and T is the threshold a comment score needs to meet to begin counting as good content. Of course, I also agree that it's probably worth weighting upv
From discussions I had with Sam, Scott, and Jack:
To solve the problem, it would suffice to find a reflexive domain with a retract onto .
This is because if you have a reflexive domain , that is, an with a continuous surjective map , and is a retract of , then there's also a continuous surjective map .
Proof: If is a retract of then we have a retraction and a section with . Construct . To show that is a surjection consider an arbitrary . Thus, . Since is a surjection there must
..."Self-Reference and Fixed Points: A Discussion and an Extension of Lawvere's Theorem" by Jorge Soto-Andrade and Francisco J. Varela seems like a potentially relevant result. In particular, they prove a converse Lawvere result in the category of posets (though they mention doing this for in an unsolved problem.) I'm currently reading through this and related papers with an eye to adapting their construction to (I think you can't just use it straight-forwardly because even though you can build a reflexive domain with a retract to an arbitrary p
...A bit of an aside, but for me the reference to "If" is a turn off. I read it as promoting a fairly-arbitrary code of stoicism rather than effectiveness. The main message I get is keep cool, don't complain, don't show that you're affected by the world, and now you've achieved your goal,
I agree that the poem is about stoicism, but have a very different take on what stoicism is. Real stoicism is about training the elephant to be less afraid and more stable and thereby accomplish more. For example, the standard stoic meditation technique of thin...
Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.
Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the u...
I didn't leave due to burn-out.
Quixey is a great place to work, and I learned a lot working there. My main reason for leaving was that I wanted to be able to devote more time and mental energy to some of my own thoughts and projects.
Offhand, I'm guessing the very first response ought to be "Huzzah! I caught myself procrastinating!" in order to get the reverse version of the effect I mentioned. Then go on to "what would I like to do?"
I've been able to implement something like this to great effect. Every time I notice that I've been behaving in a very silly way, I smile broadly, laugh out loud and say "Ha ha! Gotcha!" or something to that effect. I only allow myself to do this in cases where I've actually gained new information: Noticed a new flaw, noticed an old flaw come up in a new situation, realized that an old behavior is in fact undesirable, etc. This positively reinforces noticing my flaws without doing so to the undesirable behavior itself.
This is even more effe...
Here's a theory about one of the things that causes procrastination to be so hard to beat. I'm curious what people think of it.
Hypothesis: Many parts of the mind are influenced by something like reinforcement learning, where the emotional valances of our thoughts function as a gross reward signal that conditions their behaviors.
Reinforcement learning seems to have a far more powerful effect when feedback is instant.
We think of procrastinating as a bad thing, and tend to internally punish ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it.
Therefore, the ne
This sounds reasonable. What sort of thought would you recommend responding with after noticing oneself procrastinating? I'm leaning towards "what would I like to do?"
I am going to be there.
Why do I think anthropic reasoning and consciousness are related?
In a nutshell, I think subjective anticipation requires subjectivity. We humans feel dissatisfied with a description like "well, one system running a continuation of the computation in your brain ends up in a red room and two such systems end up in green rooms" because we feel that there's this extra "me" thing, whose future we need to account for. We bother to ask how the "me" gets split up, what "I" should anticipate, because we feel that there's &q...
The most effective version of this would probably be an iPhone (or similar mobile device) application that gives a dollar to charity when you push a button. If it's going to work reliably it has to be something that can be used when the beggar/cause invocation is in sight: for most people, I'm guessing that akrasia would probably prevent a physical box or paper ledger from working properly.
I recently visited Los Angeles with a friend. Whenever we got lost wandering around the city, he would find the nearest homeless person, ask them for directions and pay them a dollar. (Homeless people tend to know the street layout and bus routes of their city like the backs of their hands.)
Yes, we have a name from this, Religion
Agreed, but the fact that religion exists makes the prospect of similar things whose existence we are not aware of all the scarier. Imagine, for example, if there were something like a religion one of whose tenants is that you have to fool yourself into thinking that the religion doesn't exist most of the time.
They say that everybody in the world who knows about "The Game" is playing The Game. This means that, right now, you are playing The Game. The objective of The Game is to forget about its existence and the fact that you are playing for as long as possible. Also, if you should remember, you must forget again as quickly as possible.
There are transparent contradictions inherent in all current mathematical systems for reasoning about real numbers, but no human mathematician/physicist can notice them because they rely heavily on visuospacial reasoning to construct real analysis proofs.
I thought about this once, but I discovered that there are in fact people who have little or no visual or spatial reasoning capabilities. I personally tested one of my colleagues in undergrad with a variant of the Mental Rotation Task (as part of a philosophy essay I was writing at the time) and found t...
I'm not sure of the mathematical details, but I believe the fact you can tie knots in rope falsifies your first bullet point. I find it hard very hard to believe that all knots could be hallucinated.
(All cats, on the other hand, is brilliant.)
Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
Fabulous story idea.
I'm not sure the cost of privately held false beliefs is as low as you think it is. The universe is heavily Causally Entangled. Now even if in your example, the shape of the earth isn't causally entangled with anything our mechanic cares about, that doesn't get you off the hook. A false belief can shoot you in the foot in at least two ways. First, you might explicitly use it to reason about the value of some other variable in your causal graph. Second, your intuition might draw on it as an analogy when you are reasoning about something else.
If our car ...
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
-- Albert Einstein
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire
Incidentally, I agree that using the term "spirituality" is not necessarily bad. Though, I'm careful to try to use it to refer to the general emotion of awe/wonder/curiosity about the universe. To me the word means something quite opposed to religion. I mean the emotion I felt years ago when I watched Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".... To me religion looks like what happens when spirituality is snuffed out by an answer which isn't as wonderfully strange and satisfyingly true as it could have been.
It's a word with positive connotations, and w...
Michael Vassar said:
Naive realism is a supernatural belief system anyway
What exactly do you mean by "supernatural" in this context? Naive realism doesn't seem to be anthropomorphizing any ontologically fundamental things, which is what I mean when I say "supernatural".
Now of course naive realism does make the assumption that certain assumptions about reality which are encoded in our brains from the get go are right, or at least probably right, in short, that we have an epistemic gift. However, that can't be what you meant by &qu...
Your version is now the official version 0.3. However, the one thing you changed (possibly unintentionally) was to make Kibitzing default to on. I changed it back to defaulting to off, because it's easy to click the button if you're curious, but impossible to un-see who wrote all the comments, if you didn't want to look.
That particular hack looks like a bad idea. What if somebody actually put a bold-face link into a post or comment? However, your original suggestion wan't as bad. All non-relative links to user pages get blocked by the anti-kibitzer. (Links in "Top contributors" and stuff in comments seem to be turned into relative links if they point inside LW.) It's gross, but it works.
Version 0.2 is now up. It hides everything except the point-counts on the recent posts (there was no tag around those.) (Incidentally, I don't have regular expressions bec...
I've upgraded the LW anti-kibitzer so that it hides the taglines in the recent comments sidebar as well. (Which is imperfect, because it also hides which post the comment was about, but better will have to wait until the server starts enclosing all the kibitzing pieces of information in nice tags.) No such hack was possible for the recent posts sidebar.
A phrase like trying to see my way clear to should be a giant red flag. If you're trying to accept something then you must have some sort of motivation. If you have the motivation to accept something because you actually believe it is true, then you've already accepted it. If you have that motivation for some other reason, then you're deceiving yourself.
It strikes me that it's not necessarily a bad thing if people are, right now, posting articles faster than they could sustainably produce in the long term. One thing you could do is not necessarily promote things immediately after they're written. Stuff on LW should still be relevant a week after it's written.
If there's a buffer of good posts waiting to be promoted, then we could make the front page a consistent stream of good articles, as opposed to having to promote slightly lower quality posts on bad days, and missing out on a few excellent posts on f...
The Wikipedia link is broken.
Is there a way to make strike-through text? I'd like to be able to make revisions like this one without deleting the record of what I originally said.
well exactly... If the person were thinking rationally enough to contemplate that argument, they really wouldn't need it.
My working model of this person was that the person has rehearsed emotional and argumentative defenses to protect their belief, or belief in belief, and that the person had the ability to be reasonably rational in other domains where they weren't trying to be irrational. It therefore seemed to me that one strategy (while still dicey) to attempt to unconvince such a person would be to come up with an argument which is both:
Solid (Fo
I stand corrected. I hereby strike the first two sentences.
If I had been talking to the person you were talking to, I might have said something like this:
Why are you deceiving yourself into believing Orthodox Judaism as opposed to something else? If you, in fact, are deriving a benefit from deceiving yourself, while at the same time being aware that you are deceiving yourself, then why haven't you optimized your deceptions into something other than an off-the-shelf religion by now? Have you ever really asked yourself the question: "What is the set of things that I would derive the most benefit from falsely ...
Ah, I didn't know you could embed images because it wasn't in the help. Would it be a good idea to put a link to a Markdown tutorial at the bottom of the table that pops up when I click the help link?
The idea that that you shouldn't internally argue for or against things or propose solutions too soon is probably the most frequently useful thing. I sometimes catch myself arguing for or against something and then I think "No, I should really just ask the question."
Looking at this comment from three years in the future, I'll just note that there's something quite ironic about your having put Sam Bankman-Fried on this list! If only he'd refactored his identity more! But no, he was stuck in short-sighted-greed/CDT/small-self, and we all paid a price for that, didn't we?