All of Mir's Comments + Replies

This is amazing, thank you.  I strongly suspect this is something particular about you, but just in case:  do you have a general theory for why it works for you?

This is awesome, thank you so much!  Green leaf indicates that you're new (or new alias) here?  Happy for LW! : )

"But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel?  She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good.  There are no gods in dath ilan.  Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?"

I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I'd invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had ... (read more)

gosh, just the title succinctly expresses what I've spent multiple paragraphs trying to explain many times over.  unusually good compression, thank you.

Dumb question: Why doesn't it just respond "Golden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate BridgeGolden Gate Bridge" and so on?

I rly like the idea of making songs to powerfwly remind urself abt things. TODO.

Step 1: Set an alarm for the morning. Step 2: Set the alarm tone for this song. Step 3: Make the alarm snooze for 30 minutes after the song has played. Step 4: Make the alarm only dismissable with solving a puzzle. Step 5: Only ever dismiss the alarm after you already left the house for the walk. Step 6: Always have an umbrella for when it is rainy, and have an alternative route without muddy roads.

I currently (until I get around to making a better system...) have an AI v... (read more)

I gave it a try two years ago, and I rly liked the logic lectures early on (basicly a narrativization of HAE101 (for beginners)), but gave up soon after.  here are some other parts I lurned valuable stuff fm:

• when Keltham said "I do not aspire to be weak."
• and from an excerpt he tweeted (idk context):
  
  "if at any point you're calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you're doing it wrong."
  
   
• Keltham briefly talks about the danger of (what I call) "proportional rewards".  I seem to not hv noted down where in the book I read it, but it inspi

some metabolic pathways cannot be done at the same time

Have you updated on this since you made this comment (I ask to check whether I should invest in doing a search)? If not, do you now recall any specific examples?

Edit: I found the post usefwl, thankmuch!!

Mh, was gonna ask when you were taking it.  I'm preparing to try it as a sleep-aid for when I adjust my polyphasic sleep-schedule (wanting to go fm 16h-cycles potentially down to 9h) bc it seems potentially drowsymaking and has much faster plasma decay-rate^[1] compared to alts.  This is good for polyphasic if not want drowsy aft wake.

The data in ^[1] concerns 100mg tablets, however, and a larger dose (eg 400mg) may be longer. The kinetic model^[2] they use will prob be good estimate of p... (read more)

this is rly good.  summary of what i lurned:

• assume the ravens call a particular pattern iff it rains the next day. 
  • iow, $\frac{P\left(\text{raven's call}|\text{rain}\right)}{P\left(\text{raven's call}|\neg \text{rain}\right)}=\text{a bajillion}$, thus observing the raven's call is strong evidence u ought to hv an umbrella rdy for tomorrow.
  • "raven's call" is therefore a v good predictive var.
• but bribing the ravens to hush still might not hv any effect on whether it actually rains tomorrow.
  • it's therefore a v bad causal var.
• it cud even be the case that, up until now, it never not rained unless the raven's called, an

u'r encouraged to write it!

You have permission to steal my work & clone my generating function. Liberate my vision from its original prison. Obsolescence is victory. I yearn to be surpassed. Don't credit me if it's more efficient or better aesthetics to not. Forget my name before letting it be dead weight.

but u don't know which distribution(s) u are acting in.  u only have access to a sample dist, so u are going to underestimate the variance unless u ~Bessel-correct^[1] ur intuitions.  and it matters which parts of the dists u tune ur sensors for: do u care more to abt sensitivity/specificity wrt the median cluster or sensitivity/specificity wrt the outliers?

ig sufficiently advanced vibes-based pattern-matching collapses to doing causal modelling, so my real-complaint is abt ppl whose vibe-sensors are under-dimensional.

1. ^{^}

   idk the right math tric

Fwiw, you're on my shortlist of researchers whose potential I'm most excited about. I don't expect my judgment to matter to you (or maybe up to one jot), but I mention it just in case it helps defend against the self-doubt you experience as a result of doing things differently. : )

I don't know many researchers that well, but I try to find the ones that are sufficiently unusual-in-a-specific-way to make me feel hopefwl about them. And the stuff you write here reflects exactly the unusualness what makes me hopefwl: You actually think inside your own head.

Als... (read more)

I notice that the mathematics-frame I used to try to generate a solution was utterly inadequate, whereas the programming-frame is much more productive wrt this problem. I think one big general weakness of my general math-frame, is that it imagines/visualises infinities as static, rather than as conceptually chunked dynamic processes.

Did you diagnose sleep apnea before getting the CPAP?

I'm surprised at your mention of kale (will look into it!) and pig's blood. I think it's good to mention here that pigs are prob sentient, and that it's mean to eat them unless there are very strong utilitarian reasons to do so anyway. I think you prob have such reasons, because you are competently trying to save the world, so I'm glad you're making moral sacrifices to get stuff done.

"Also, I now have a methylphenidate prescription which is pretty magical. I can now steer my mind."

<3

Are you able to ask your psychiatrist for a larger dose? I think it could to at least 60mg, but idk.

I don't know the full original reasoning for why they introduced it, but one hope is that it marginally disentangles agreement from the main voting axis. People who were going to upvote based purely on agreement will now put their vote in the agreement axis instead (is the hope, anyway). Agreement-voting is socioepistemologically bad in general (except for in polls), so this seems good.

weird, i was intending that as a reply to @trevor's answer, but it got plopped as its own answer instead.

my brain is insufficiently flexible to be able to surrender to social-status-incentives without letting that affect my ability to optimise purely for my goal. the costs of compromise (++) btn diff optimisation criteria are steep, so i would encourage more ppl to rebel against prevailing social dynamics. it helps u think more clearly. it also mks u miserable, so u hv to balance it w concerns re motivation. altruism never promised to be easy. 🍵

Related recommendation: Inward and outward steelmanning — LessWrong

Imagine that you encountered a car with square wheels

Inward steelmanning: "This is an abomination! It doesn't work! But maybe with round wheels it would be beautiful. Or maybe a different vehicle with square wheels could be beautiful."

Outward steelmanning: "This is ugly! It doesn't work! But maybe if I imagine a world where this car works, it will change my standards of beauty. Maybe I will gain some insight about this world that I'm missing."

If you want to be charitable, why not grant your

there has to be some point in time in which an agent acts like waiting just one more timestep before pressing wouldn’t be worth it even though it would.

if it's impossible to choose "jst one mor timestep" wo logically implying that u mk the same decision in other timesteps (eg due to indifferentiable contexts), then it's impossible to choose jst one mor timestep. optimal decision-mking also means recognising which opts u hv and which u don't—otherwise u'r jst falling fr illusory choices.

which brings to mind the principle, "u nvr mk decisions, u only evr dec... (read more)

It seems good to have an abstraction-level with separate concepts for soras and their weights.

I'm less enthusiastic about "sora" as the word for it, however, even though I like its aesthetics. Seems like it ought to be longer than 4 chars, and less isolated in meaning. I've wanted to find a more specific fit for the word "neureme" (from "emic unit"/"-eme",  categorising it as a unit of selection alongside gene, meme, morpheme, lexeme, grapheme, etc), and I like your concept for it.^[1] See here for my philosophy on word up-making.

1. ^{^}

   This just means

I was very very terrible at introspection just 2 years ago. Yet I did manage to learn how to make very good games, without really introspecting for years later about why the things work that I did.

More specifically, I mean progress wrt some long-term goal like AI alignment, altruism, factory farming, etc. Here, I think most ways of thinking about the problem are wildly off-target bc motivations get distorted by social incentives. Whereas goals in narrow games like "win at chess" or "solve a math problem" are less prone to this, so introspection is much less important.

I sort of deliberately created the beginnings of a tulpa-ish part of my brain during a long period of isolation in 2021 (Feb 7 to be exact), although I didn't know the term "tulpa" then. I just figured it could be good to have an imaginary friend, so I gave her a name—"Maria"^[1]—and granted her (as part of the brain-convincing ritual) permanent co-ownership over a part of my cognition which she's free to use for whatever whenever.

She still visits me at least once a week but she doesn't have strong ability to speak unless I try to imagine it; and even then,... (read more)

Oi! This was potentially usefwl for me to read.

WHEN I feel bad/uneasy at any point,
THEN find the part of my mind that's complaining, and lend it my voice & mental-space.

I have previously tried to install a "somatic trigger" for whenever I feel bad (ie "when I feel bad, close my eyes and fold my hands together in front of me in a calm motion"), but it failed to take bc there weren't clear-enough cues. The point of a somatic trigger in the first place is to install them in specific contexts such that I have clearer cues for whatever habits I may wish to write into those contexts.

Are those insights gleamable from the video itself for other people? And if so, would you be willing to share the link? (Feel free to skip; obviously a vulnerable topic.)

[Thoughts ↦ speech-code ↦ text-code] just seems like a convoluted/indirect learning-path. Speech has been optimised directly (although very gradually over thousands of years) to encode thoughts, whereas most orthographies are optimised to encode sounds. The symbols are optimised only via piggy-backing on the thoughts↦speech code—like training a language-model indirectly via NTP on [the output of an architecturally-different language-model trained via NTP on human text].

(In the conlang-orthography I aspire to make with AI-assistance, graphemes don't try to ... (read more)

Specifically a lot more creative than people who are as intelligent as I am.

Having read a few of your posts, I think you're correct about this. I believe in your general approach!

As you mention that stimulants can reduce "mental noise/creativity" I am curious what your experience is with this.

When I first started taking them, it revealed to me that I'd never known what it felt like to be able to think a thought through. Metaphorically, I imagine it sorta like being born with COPD and never realising what it feels like to fill my lungs with air. But I've pr... (read more)

My current theory is that when you are writing something down, the slowdown effect is actually beneficial because you have more cognitive resources available to compute the next thing you write.

I've noticed the same when voice-typing, and I considered that explanation. I don't think it's the main cause, however. With super-fast and accurate STT (or steno), I suspect I could learn to both think better and type faster. There's already an almost-audible internal monologue going on while I type. Adding the processing-cost of having to translate internal-audio-... (read more)

My best insight is that you can think. Because most of the failure comes from not thinking. … I was making these kinds of excuses for years… and I made basically no progress before I just tried."

I resonate with this. Cognitive psychology and sequences taught me to be extremely mistrustful of my own thoughts, and while I do think much of that was a necessary first step, I also think it's very easy to get stuck in that mindset because you've disowned the only tools that can save you. Non-cognition is very tempting if your primary motivation is to not be wron... (read more)

Wow, this is a good argument. Especially if assumptions hold.

1. The ALU computes the input much faster than the results can be moved to the next layer.
2. So if the AI only receives a single user's prompt, the ALUs waste a lot of time waiting for input.
3. But if many users are sending prompts all the time, the ALUs can be sent many more operations at once (assuming the wires are bottlenecked by speed rather than amount of information they can carry).
4. So if your AI is extremely popular (e.g., OpenAI), your ALUs have to spend less time idling, so the GPUs you use are much more cost-effective.
5. Compute is much more expensive for less popular AIs (plausibly >1000x).

cool third point! i may hv oversold the point in my first comment. i too try to name things according to their thingness, but not exclusively.

to make a caricature of my research loop, i could describe it as

1. trying to find patterns that puzzle me (foraging),
2. distilling the pattern to its core structure and storing it in RemNote (catabolic pathway),
3. mentally trying to find new ways to apply the pattern
   1. ie, propagating it, installing hooks (which I call isthmuses) into plausibly-related contexts such that new cryptically-related observations are more likely to tr

The thing people need to realize is that when somebody writes a bad post, it doesn't harm the readers (except insofar as you falsely advertised quality). If something is badly argued readers are immune. If something is persuasively argued, but wrong, readers that fall for it now have an opportunity to discover a hole in their epistemic defenses.

Mostly, people read arguments as a proxies for making judgments about the quality of the author, or whether they agree/disagree with them. Notice that these purposes are orthogonal to actually learning something.

Unr... (read more)

This is awesome. I found it via searching LW for variations of "voice typing", Which I was motivated to search because I had just discovered that average conversational speed is around 3x average typing speed (~150 vs ~50 wpm, cf ChatGPT). (And reading speeds are potentially in the thousands.)

At the moment, I'm using Windows Voice Access. It's accurate, has some nice voice commands and gives you visual feedback while speaking. The inadequacy, for me, is the lack of immediate feedback (compared to typing), and customisability. I'll attempt to test your repo... (read more)

I highly recommend trying to get a prescription for something like adderall (or dextroamphetamine, lisdexamphetamine) if your doctor is willing to diagnose you with ADHD. Just go off it if it doesn't work, but it seems likely that it will given your response to bupropion. Some vague reasons for recommending it are:

1. Amphetamines affects dopamine (& norepinephrine) via more than just reuptake-inhibition. I'm not sure yet which mechanisms drive desensitization, it just seems tentatively better to spread the attack vectors out.
2. I've mostly forgot the reasons

This is among the top questions you ought to accumulate insights on if you're trying to do something difficult.

I would advise primarily focusing on how to learn more from yourself as opposed to learning from others, but still, here's what I think:

I. Strict confusion

Seek to find people who seem to be doing something dumb or crazy, and for whom the feeling you get when you try to understand them is not "I'm familiar with how someone could end up believing this" but instead "I've got no idea how they ended up there, but that's just absurd". If someone believe... (read more)

is that spreadsheet of {Greek name, Germanic name, …} public perchance?

Thank you! : )

Please continue complimenting people (or express gratitude) for things you honestly appreciate.

i think that goes into optimising for b in my taxonomy above. how easy is it to recall the structure of the thing once you've recalled the word for the thing? these are just considerations, and the optimal naming strat varies by situs ig. 🍵

This seems like a question one shouldn't be using statistical evidence to make an opinion about. It seems tractable to just grok (and intuify) the theoretical considerations and thus gain a much better understanding of when vs when not to decompose (and with how much granularity and by which method). Deferring to statistics on it seems liable to distort the model—such that I don't think a temporary increase in the accuracy of final-stage judgments would be worth it.

did you know that, if you're a hermit, you get infinite weirdness points?

✧*｡ヾ( >﹏< )ﾉﾞ✧*。

when making new words, i try to follow this principle:

label concepts such that the label has high association w situations in which you want the concept to trigger.^[1]

the usefwlness of a label can be measured on multiple fronts:

1. how easy is it to recall (or regenerate):
   1. the label just fm thinking abt the concept?
      1. low-priority, since you already have the concept.
   2. the concept just fm seeing the label?
      1. mid-priority, since this is easy to practice.^[2]
   3. the label fm situations where recalling the concept has utility?
      1. high-priority, since this is the only reason to both

here's the non-quantified meaning in terms of wh-movement from right to left:

$S:\underset{\text{image: rain inside your prospective thoughts}}{\underset{}{\underset{\text{image: you thinking}}{\underset{}{\text{I think}\underset{–}{\text{what}}}}\underset{\text{(circumfix time operator)}}{\underset{}{\text{it'll}\underset{–}{\text{what}}\text{tomorrow}}}\underset{\text{image: rain}}{\underset{}{\text{rain}}}}}$

for conlanging, i like${}_{95\%}$ this set of principles:

1. minimise total visual distance between operators and their arguments
2. minimise total novelty/complexity/size of all items the reader is forced to store in m

Surely, there is a clever mechanism that can fix this issue? So I went to the Wikipedia page of the Free-rider Problem and scrolled to the bottom, and lo and behold it was just sitting there: Dominant Assurance Contracts.

I feel like every assurance-contract proponent went through a moment like this. It's like "Don't Look Up" except wrt a civilization-scale solution. I'm tempted to think some people 'just don't get it' because they're missing gears-level models re coordination problems in the first place, but that would be hasty.

If you're vegan and drink lots of tea (guilty), consider avoiding tea at least one hour before and after the time you eat iron-rich food. The worry is that polyphenols in tea bind with non-heme iron, forming a stable-ish complex that prevents absorption. There's weak evidence that this makes a practical difference, but it was especially relevant for me since I drink tea almost exclusively.

From the available evidence there is no need to advise any restriction on tea drinking in healthy people with no risk of iron deficiency. In groups at risk of iron defici

I was about to request clarification on this too. I don't get 

"science is the way of making beliefs come apart from their pre-theoretical pragmatic implications."

And I would like to get it.

Endorsed. I think what you should do about deferral depends on what role you wish to play in the research community. Knowledge workers intending to make frontier progress should be especially skeptical of deferring to others on the topics they intend to specialise in. That may mean holding off on deferring on a wide range of topics, because curious scientists should keep a broad horizon early on. Deferring early on could lead to habits-of-thought that can be hard to override later on (sorta like curse of knowledge), and you might miss out on opportunities ... (read more)