All of noggin-scratcher's Comments + Replies

How should we speak about "stressful events"? Maybe instead of, “buying a plane ticket is stressful”, something like, "buying a plane ticket made me stressed." But the word "made" implies inevitability and still cedes too much power to the event

"I am feeling stressed about buying a plane ticket" would acknowledge that the stress is coming from within you as an individual, and doesn't foreclose the possibility of instead not feeling stressed.

Technically it's still never falsifiable. It can be verifiable, if true, upon finding yourself in an afterlife after death. But if it's false then you don't observe it being false when you cease existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatological_verification

If we define a category of beliefs that are currently neither verifiable or falsifiable, but might eventually become verifiable if they happen to be true, but won't be falsifiable even if they're false—that category potentially includes an awful lot of invisible pink dragons and orbiting teapots (who... (read more)

Looks like #6 in the TL;DRs section is accidentally duplicated (with the repeat numbered as #7)

Solid point. I realise I was unclear that for face shape I had in mind external influences in utero (while the bones of the face are growing into place in the fetus). Which would at least be a somewhat shared environment between twins. But nonetheless, changing my mind in real-time, because I would have expected more difference from one side of a womb to the other than we actually see between twins. 

Even if I'm mistaken about faces though, I don't think I'm wrong about brains, or humans in general.

In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.

The shape of your face, and much else besides, will be affected by random chance and environmental influences during the process of development and growth. 

The eventual details of the brain, likewise, will be in large part a response to the environment—developing and learning from experience. 

So the final complexity of a human being is not actually bounded by the data contained in the genome, in the way described. 

I wasn't the one eating it, but having prepared a couple of Huel's "hot meal pot/pouch" options for my partner (I forget which ones exactly, but something in the way of mac & cheese or pasta bolognese), I can report that I found the smell coming off it to be profoundly unappetising.

Not sure how they went down with her, but there's a small stash of these pots in the cupboard that she hasn't touched beyond the first few—so I suspect not very well.

Slight glitches:

The "chapter shortcuts" section of https://www.lesswrong.com/s/9SJM9cdgapDybPksi lists "editPost" links to the chapter drafts (inaccessible to others)

The numbering in the post titles skip over #4

Oh I was very on board with the sarcasm. Although as a graduate of one of them, I obviously can't believe you're rating the other one so highly.

This is a general principal

Principle* — unless they're the head-teacher of a school, the type to be involved in a principal/agent problem, or otherwise the "first"

graduates of the great English universities (both of them)

Shots fired

That definitely looks like the one. Appears I'd forgotten some of the context/details though.

I could swear there was a similar Scott Alexander post, about flirting deliberately skirting the edge of plausible deniability to avoid prematurely creating common knowledge. With an analogy to spies trying to identify a fellow operative without overtly tipping their hand in case they were mistaken and speaking to a non-spy.

Can't find it now: might have since been deleted, or might have only ever existed on LiveJournal or Tumblr or something.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/26/conversation-deliberately-skirts-the-border-of-incomprehensibility/ is similar but not explicitly about flirting.

While I can appreciate it on the level of nerd aesthetics, I would be dubious of the choice of Quenya. Unless you're already a polyglot (as a demonstration of your aptitude for language-learning), it seems unlikely—without a community of speakers to immerse yourself in—that you'll reach the kind of fluid fluency that would make it natural to think in a conlang.

And if you do in fact have the capacity to acquire a language to that degree of fluency so easily, but don't already have several of the major world languages, it seems to me that the benefits of being able to communicate with an additional fraction of the world's population would outweigh those of knowing a language selected for mostly no-one else knowing it.

The strategy above makes all three statements seem equally unlikely to be true. Mathematically equivalent but with different emphasis would be to make all three statements seem equally unlikely to be false.

i.e. Pick things that seem so mundane and ordinary that surely they must be universally true—then watch the reaction as it is realised that one of them must actually be a lie.

I suspect there has to be a degree of mental disconnect, where they can see that things don't all happen (or not happen) equally as often as each other, but answering the math question of "What's the probability?" feels like a more abstract and different thing.

Maybe mixed up with some reflexive learned helplessness of not really trying to do math because of past experience that's left them thinking they just can't get it.

Possibly over generalising from early textbook probability examples involving coins and dice, where counting up and dividing by the number of possible outcomes is a workable approach.

I know someone who taught math to low-ability kids, and reported finding it difficult to persuade them otherwise. I assume some number of them carried on into adulthood still doing it.

In the infinite limit (or just large-ish x), the probability of at least one success, from nx attempts with 1/x odds on each attempt, will be 1 - ( 1 / e^n )

For x attempts, 1 - 1/e = 0.63212

For 2x attempts 1 - 1/e^2 = 0.86466

For 3x attempts 1 - 1/e^3 = 0.95021

And so on

Ironically, the even more basic error of probabilistic thinking that people so—painfully—commonly make ("It either happens or doesn't, so it's 50/50") would get closer to the right answer.

not intended to be replayed

I have flagrantly disregarded this advice in an attempt to uncover its secrets. I'm assuming there are still a bunch of patterns that remain obscure, but the ones I have picked up on allowed me to end day 60 with 5581 food just now. So I'm calling that good enough.

Rat Ruins: 

Dragon Lake: 

Goat Grove:

Horse Hills: 

Also, the guy is spamming his post about spamming applications into all the subreddits, which gives the whole thing a great meta twist, I wonder if he’s using AI for that too.

I'm pretty sure I saw what must be the same account, posting blatantly AI generated replies/answers across a ton of different subreddits, including at least some that explicitly disallow that.

Either that or someone else's bot was spamming AI answer comments while also spamming copycat "I applied to 1000 jobs with AI" posts.

The golden rule can perhaps be enhanced by applying it on a meta level: rather than "I would like to be offered oral sex, therefore I should offer oral sex", a rule of "I like it when people consider my preferences and desires before acting, and offer me things I want—therefore I should do the same for others by being considerate and attentive to their preferences and desires, but I don't expect they want to be offered oral sex"

But then, if you're getting different and contradictory recommendations depending on how much meta you decide to apply, that rather defeats the point of having a rule to follow.

Ah, perils of text-only communication and my own mild deficiency in social senses; didn't catch that it was a joke.

Has nonetheless got me thinking about whether some toasted oats would be a good addition to any of the recipes I already like. Lil bit of extra bulk and texture, some browned nutty notes—there's not nothing to that.

Not wishing to be rude but this feels like it's missing a section on the benefits of eating oatmeal sometimes.

There's a favourable comparison to the protein/fibre/arsenic content of white rice, but I don't eat a lot of white rice so I am left unclear on the motivation for substituting something I do eat with oatmeal.

I'm skeptical that continuity of personal identity is actually real, beyond a social consensus and a deeply held evolved instinct. I don't expect there are metaphysical markers that strictly delineate which person-moments are part of "the same" ongoing person through time. So hypothetical new scenarios like teleportation, brain emulation, clones built from brain scans (etc) are indeed challenging—they break apart things that have previously always gone together as a bundle.

Even so, physical continuity of the brain involved seems like a reasonable basis for... (read more)

This feels like you are, on some level, not thinking of consciousness as a thing that is fully and actually made of atoms. Instead talking about it like an immaterial soul that happens to currently be floating around in the vicinity of a particular set of atoms—but could in theory float off elsewhere to some other set of atoms that happens to be momentarily be arranged into a pattern that's similar enough to confuse the consciousness into attaching itself to to a different body.

In an atoms-first view of the world (where you have a brain made of physical st... (read more)

Even if there wasn't an AI voice clone involved, I'm still suspicious that someone was getting scammed. Just on priors for an unsolicited crypto exchange referral.

Do you find there's any difficulty in retaining/integrating things you've read in short few-minute snippets between other activities?

I'll accept that concern as well-intentioned, but I think it's misplaced.

I've offered zero detail of any of the accounts I've seen posting about mind uploads (I don't have the account names recorded anywhere myself, so couldn't share if I wanted to), and those accounts were in any case typically throwaway usernames that posted only once or a few times, so had no other personal detail attached to be doxxed with. They were only recognisable as the same returning user because of the consistent subject matter.

Genuinely just curious about whether the people I h... (read more)

Point of curiosity: do you happen to have posted about this scenario on the subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions/ ?

Because someone has (quite persistently returning on many different accounts to keep posting about it)

The technical meaning is a stimulus that produces a stronger response than the stimulus for which that response originally evolved.

So for example a candy bar having a carefully engineered combination of sugar, fat, salt, and flavour in proportions that make it more appetising than any naturally occurring food. Or outrage-baiting infotainment "news" capturing attention more effectively than anything that one villager could have said to another about important recent events.

Phil Magness notes that students could instead start their majors. That implies that when you arrive on campus, you should know what major is right for you.

That sounds like the way we do it in the UK: there's no norm of "picking a major" during the course of your time at university - you apply to a specific course, and you study that from the start.

Probably why a standard Bachelor's degree is expected to be a 3 year course rather than 4.

By the way, another tactic that is similar (and really prohibited in formal debates) is overloading the speech with technical terms

Possible typo: it is "really" prohibited, or "rarely" prohibited?

Or to add on to the thought, there are non-LW pro-truth/knowledge idioms like "knowledge is power", "the truth will set you free", or "honesty is the best policy"

"The truth hurts", "ignorance is bliss", and "what you don't know can't hurt you" don't contradict: they all say you're better off not knowing some bit of information that would be unpleasant to know, or that a small "white lie" is allowable.

The opposite there would be phrases I've mostly seen via LessWrong like "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be", or "what is true is already true, owning up to it doesn't make it worse", or "if you tell one lie, the truth is thereafter your enemy", or the general ethos that knowing true information enables effective action.

Sticking to multiples of three does have a minor advantage of aligning itself with things that there are already number-words for; "thousand", "million", "billion" etc. 

So for those who don't work with the notation often, they might find it easier to recognise and mentally translate 20e9 as "20 billion", rather than having to think through the implications of 2e10

I haven't checked word count to identify the best excerpt, but Chapter 88 has some excellent tension to it. All you need to know to understand the stakes is that there's a troll loose, and it's got lessons about bystander effects and taking responsibility.

You’ve heard some trite truism your whole life, then one day an epiphany lands and you try to save it with words, and you realize the description is that truism

Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen

I'm finding myself stuck on the question of how exactly the strict version would avoid the use of some of those negating adjectives. If you want to express the information that, say, eating grass won't give the human body useful calories...

• "Grass is indigestible" : disallowed
• "Grass is not nutritious" : disallowed
• "Grass will pass through you without providing energy" : "without providing energy" seems little different to "not providing energy", it's still at heart a negative claim

Perhaps a restatement in terms of "Only food that can be easily digested... (read more)

I know few people these days who aren't using ChatGPT and Midjourney in some small way.

We move in very different social circles.

Have to ask: how much of the text of this post was written by ChatGPT?

I don't have lots of keys, or frequent changes to which ones I want to carry, but a tiny carabiner has still proved useful to make individual keys easily separable from the bunch.

As an example, being able to quickly and easily say "here's the house key: you go on ahead and let yourself in, while I park the car" without the nuisance of prying the ring open to twiddle the key off.

Low positive and actively negative scores seen to me to send different signals. A low score can be confused for general apathy, imagining that few people having taken notice of the post enough to vote on it. A negative score communicates clearly that something about the post was objectionable or mistaken.

If the purpose of the scoring system is to aggregate opinions, then negative opinions are a necessary input for an accurate score.

Strikes me as inelegant for the final score to depend on the order in which readers happened to encounter the post. Which woul... (read more)

My sense (from 10+ years on reddit, 2 of which spent moderating a somewhat large/active subreddit) is that there's a "geeks MOPs and sociopaths"–like effect, where a small subreddit can (if it's lucky enough to start with one) maintain a distinctive identity around the kernel of a cool idea, with a small select group who are self-selected for a degree of passion about that idea.

But as the size of the group grows it gradually gets diluted with poor imitators, who are upvoted by a general audience who are less discerning about whether posts are in the origin... (read more)

Oh I see (I think) - I took "my face being picked up by the camera" to mean the way the camera can recognise and track/display the location of a face (thought you were making a point about there being a degree of responsiveness and mixed processing/data involved in that), rather than the literal actual face itself.

A camera is a sensor gathering data. Some of that data describes the world, including things in the world, including people with faces. Your actual face is indeed neither software nor data: it's a physical object. But it does get described by dat... (read more)

I'm not certain I follow your intent with that example, but I don't think it breaks any category boundaries.

The process using some algorithm to find your face is software. It has data (a frame of video) as input, and data (coordinates locating a face) as output. The facial recognition algorithm itself was maybe produced using training data and a learning algorithm (software).

There's then some more software which takes that data (the frame of video and the coordinates) and outputs new data (a frame of video with a rectangle drawn around your face).

It is fre... (read more)

True to say that there's a distinction between software and data. Photo editor, word processor, video recorder: software. Photo, document, video: data.

I think similarly there's a distinction within parts of "the AI", where the weights of the model are data (big blob of stored numbers that the training software calculated). Seems inaccurate though, to say that AI "isn't software" when you do still need software running that uses those weights to do the inference.

I guess I take your point, that some of the intuitions people might have about software (that it... (read more)

Is there (or could there be) an RSS option that excludes Dialogue posts?

I think I'm currently using the "all posts" feed, but I prefer the brevity and coherence that comes from a single author with a thought they're trying to communicate to a reader, as compared to two people communicating conversationally with each other.

why 0^1 = 1 and not 0

Just to check, did you here mean 0^0 ?

It's been a while since I did much math, but I thought that was the one that counterintuitively equals 1. Whereas 0^1=1 just seems like it would create an unwelcome exception to the x^1=x rule.

I'm not working on X because when I start to look at it my brain seizes up with a formless sense of dread at even the familiar parts of the task and I can't find the "start doing" lever.

I'm not working on X because the ticket for it was put in by that guy and I don't want to deal with the inevitable nitpicking follow-up questions and unstated additional work.

I'm not working on X because if I start doing the easy parts that would commit me to also doing the hard parts. Maybe if I leave it, some other sucker will take it on and I won't have to do it at all.

I... (read more)