All of papetoast's Comments + Replies

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04682 

Reading the abstract immediately reminds me of this post

We propose a novel framework, Meta Chain-of-Thought (Meta-CoT), which extends traditional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning required to arrive at a particular CoT. 

As someone who wrote pages of pedantic rules for minecraft doors, I relate to this post a lot. Rules are just hard to write and to enforce consistently

This is pretty cool. A small complaint about the post itself is that it does not explain what Squiggle is so I had to look around in your website to understand why this Squiggle language that I have never heard of is used.

The most obvious thing is that I post things out when I want people to see it, and LW/Twitter is mostly about how serious I want to be.

I don't really. Idea get revisited when I stumble on it again, but I rarely try to plan and focus on some ideas without external stimulation.

The rules are not completely consistent over time though, also it is just not articulatable in 1 minute of effort lol. I'm sure I can explain 80% of the internal rule with effort

Obsidian/LW Shortforms/Twitter for slightly different types of ideas, can't articulate the difference though

Don't really want to touch the packages, but just setting the EVALS_THREADS environmental variable worked

Tried running but I got [eval.py:233] Running in threaded mode with 10 threads! which makes it unplayable for me (because it is trying to make me to 10 tests alternating

Wealth $10k, risk 50% on $9999 loss, recommends insure for $9900 premium.

The math is correct if you're trying to optimize log(Wealth). log(10000)=4 and log(1)=0 so the mean is log(100)=2. This model assumes going bankrupt is infinitely bad, which is not accurate of an assumption, but it is not a bug.

You can still nominate posts until Dec 14th?

Thought about community summaries a very little bit too, with the current LW UI, I envision that the most likely way to achieve this is to

1. Write a distillation comment instead of post
2. Quote the first sentence of the sequences post so that it could show up on the side at the top

3. Wait for the LW team to make this setting persistent so people can choose Show All

   

There is also the issue of things only being partially orderable.

When I was recently celebrating something, I was asked to share my favorite memory. I realized I didn't have one. Then (since I have been studying Naive Set Theory a LOT), I got tetris-effected and as soon as I heard the words "I don't have a favorite" come out of my mouth, I realized that favorite memories (and in fact favorite lots of other things) are partially ordered sets. Some elements are strictly better than others but not all elements are comparable (in other words, the set of all me

It is hard to see, changed to n.

In my life I have never seen a good one-paragraph explanation of backpropagation so I wrote one.

The most natural algorithms for calculating derivatives are done by going through the expression syntax tree^[1]. There are two ends in the tree; starting the algorithm from the two ends corresponds to two good derivative algorithms, which are called forward propagation (starting from input variables) and backward propagation respectively. In both algorithms, calculating the derivative of one output variable $y_1$ with respect to one input variable $x_1$... (read more)

Donated $25 for all the things I have learned here.

Strongly agreed. Content creators seem to get around this by creating multiple accounts for different purposes, but this is difficult to maintain for most people.

I rarely see them show awareness of the possibility that selection bias has created the effect they're describing.

In my experience with people I encounter, this is not true ;)

Joe Rogero: Buying something more valuable with something less valuable should never feel like a terrible deal. If it does, something is wrong.

clone of saturn: It's completely normal to feel terrible about being forced to choose only one of two things you value very highly.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dRTj2q4n8nmv46Xok/cost-not-sacrifice?commentId=zQPw7tnLzDysRcdQv

Yes!

1. Butterfly ideas?
2. By default I expect the author to have a pretty strong stance on the main idea of a post, also the content are usually already refined and complete, so the barrier of entry to having a comment that is valuable is higher.

Bob can choose whether to to hide this waste (at a cost of the utility loss by having $300 and worse listening experience, but a "benefit" of misleading Tim about his misplaced altruism)

True in my example. I acknowledge that my example is wrong and should have been more explicit about having an alternative. Quoting myself from the comment to Vladimir_Nesov:

Anyways, the unwritten thing is that Bob care about having a quality headphone and a good pair of shoes equally. So given that he already has an alright headphone, he would get more utility by buying a g... (read more)

Again, seems like we are in agreement lol. I agree with what you said and I meant that, but tried to compress it into one sentence and failed to communicate.

It sure can! I think we are in agreement on sunk cost fallacy. I just don't think it applies to example 1 because there exists alternatives that can keep the sunk resources. Btw this is why my example is on the order of $100, at this price point you probably have a couple alternative things to buy to spend the money.

(I need to defend the sad and the annoying in two separate parts)

1. Yes, and but sometimes that is already annoying on its own (Bob is not perfectly rational and sometimes he just really want the quality headphone, but now math tells Bob that Tim gifting him that headphone means he would have to wait e.g. ~2 years before it is worth buying a new one). Of course Bob can improve his life in other ways with his saved money, but still, would be nice if you can just ask Tim to buy something else if you had known.
2. Sometimes increasing sum(projects) does not translat

This is a tangent, but Sunk cost fallacy is not really a fallacy most of the time, because spending more resources beforehand really increases the chance of "success" most of the time. For more: https://gwern.net/sunk-cost 

I am trying to pinpoint the concept of "A doing a mediocre job of X will force B to rationally do Y instead of X, making the progress of X worse than if A had not done anything". The examples are just examples that hopefully helps you locate the thing I am handwaving at. I do not try to make them logically perfect because that would... (read more)

It is sad and annoying that if you do a mediocre job (according to the receiver), doing things even for free (volunteer work/gifting) can sabotage the receiver along the dimension you're supposedly helping.

This is super vague the way I wrote it, so examples.

Example 1. Bob wants to upgrade and buy a new quality headphone. He has a $300 budget. His friend Tim not knowing his budget, bought a $100 headphone for Bob. (Suppose second-handed headphones are worthless) Now Bob cannot just spend $300 to get a quality headphone. He would also waste Tim's $100 which ... (read more)

I want to use this chance to say that I really want to be able to bookmark a sequence

Agreed on the examples of natural abstractions. I held a couple abstraction examples in my mind (e.g. atom, food, agent) while reading the post and found that it never really managed to attack these truly very general (dare I say natural) abstractions.

I overlayed my phone's display (using scrcpy) on top of the website rendered on Windows (Firefox). Image 1 shows that they indeed scaled to align. Image 2 (Windows left, Android right) shows how the font is bolder on Windows and somewhat blurred.

The monitor is 2560x1440 (website at 140%) and the phone is 1440x3200 (100%) mapped onto 585x1300.

I am on Windows. This reply is on Android and yeah definitely some issue with Windows / my PC

I hallucinated

Re: the new style (archive for comparision)

Not a fan of

1. the font weight, everything seem semi-bolded now and a little bit more blurred than before. I do not see myself getting used to this.

2. the unboxed karma/argeement vote. It is fine per se, but the old one is also perfectly fine.

Edit: I have to say that the font on Windows is actively slightly painful and I need to reduce the time spent reading comments or quick takes.

One funny thing I have noticed about myself is that I am bad enough at communicating certain ideas in speech that sometimes it is easier to handwave at what a couple things that I don't mean and let the listener figure out the largest semantic cluster in the remaining "meaning space".

Even as I’m caught up in lazy activity, I’m making specific plans to be productive tomorrow.

How? I personally can't really make detailed or good plans during lazy mode

The link is not clickable

Manifold is pretty weak evidence for anything >=1 year away because there are strong incentives to bet on short term markets.

The list of once “secret” documents is very cool, thanks for that. (But I skimmed the other parts too)

I think the interchangeability is just hard to understand. Even though I know they are the same thing, it is still really hard to intuitively see them as being equal. I personally try (but not very hard) to stick with X -> Y in mathy discussions and if/only if for normal discussions

For nondeterministic voting surely you can just estimate the expected utility of your vote and decide whether voting is worth the effort. Probably even easier than deterministic ones.

Btw, I feel like the post is too incomplete on its own for the title Should we abstain from voting?. It feels more like Why being uninformed isn't a reason to not vote.

Maybe make a habit of blocking https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/*  while writing?

The clickbait title is misleading, but I forgive this one because I do end up finding it interesting, and it is short. In general I mostly don't try to punish things if it end up to be good/correct.

Starting today I am going to collect a list of tricks that websites use to prevent you from copy and pasting text + how to circumvent them. In general, using ublock origin and allow right click properly fixes most issues.

1. Using href (https://lnk.to/LACA-15863s, archive)

behavior: https://streamable.com/sxeblz

solution: use remove-attr in ublock origin - lnk.to##.header__link:remove-attr(href)

2. Using a background image to cover the text (https://varium.jp/talent/ahiru/, archive)

Note: this example is probably just incompetence. 

behavior: https://stream... (read more)

To answer your question directly - not really.

I think index pages are just meant to be used by only a small minority of people in any community. In my mind, the LW concepts page is like the wiki topic groups (not sure what they're called).

The similarities are:

1. It is fun to go through the concepts page and find tags I haven't learned about, this is good for exploration but a rare use case (for me)
2. Because it is an index, it is useful when you have a concept in your mind but couldn't remember the name

But the concepts page has a worse UX than wiki since you hav... (read more)

How do you use them?

I use it when I am interested in learning about a specific topic. I rarely use the Concepts page, because it contains too many tags, and sometimes I don't even know what tag I am looking for. Instead, I usually already have one or two articles that I have previously read, which feels similar to the topic I am thinking about. I would then search for those posts, look at the tags, and click on the one that is relevant. In the tag page, I start by reading the wiki, but often feel disappointed by the half-done/incompleteness of the wiki. Th... (read more)

I understand that having the audio player above the title is the path of least resistance, since you can't assume there is enough space on the right to put it in. But ideally things like this should be dynamic, and only take up vertical space if you can't put it on the right, no? (but I'm not a frontend dev)

Alternatively, I would consider moving them vertically above the title a slight improvement. It is not great either, but at least the reason for having the gap is more obvious.

The above screenshots are done in a 1920x1080 monitor

I like most of the changes, but strongly dislike the large gap before the title. (I similarly dislike the large background in the top 50 of the year posts)

Seems like every new post - no matter the karma - is getting the "listen to this post" button now. I love it.

I do believe that projects in general often fail due to lack of glue responsibilities, but didn't want to generalize too much in what I wrote.

Start with integration. Get the end-to-end WORKING MOCKUP going with hardcoded behaviors in each module, but working interfaces. This is often half or more of the work, and there's no way to avoid it - doing it at the end is painful and often fails. Doing it up front is painful but actually leads to completion.

Being able to convince everyone to put in the time to do this upfront is already a challenge :/ Sometimes I ... (read more)

A common failure mode in group projects is that students will break up the work into non-overlapping parts, and proceed to stop giving a fuck about other's work afterwards because it is not their job anymore.

This especially causes problems at the final stage where they need to combine the work and make a coherent piece out of it.

1. No one is responsible for merging the work
2. Lack of mutual communication during the process means that the work pieces cannot be nicely connected without a lot of modifications (which no one is responsible for).

At this point the dead... (read more)