And for people on the Vim side, there's VimOutliner for doing workflowy-like outlines, also with a time-tracking component.
Cal Newport on "Write Every Day". If it's not your main job, you're going to end up having no write days, and if you're committed to a hard schedule a missed day is going to translate into "welp, couldn't make the cut then, better quit for good".
Yes, The Mind Illuminated is basically the same ten-step model as the one in that article, but expanded to book length and with lots of extra practice advice and theory of mental models.
The Mind Illuminated by John Yates is my new favorite meditation instruction book. Has lots of modern neuroscience grounding, completely secular, and presents a very detailed step-by-step instruction on going from not having a daily meditation habit going to attaining very deep concentration states.
One problem is that the community has few people actually engaged enough with cutting edge AI / machine learning / whatever-the-respectable-people-call-it-this-decade research to have opinions that are grounded in where the actual research is right now. So a lot of the discussion is going to consist of people either staying quiet or giving uninformed opinions to keep the conversation going. And what incentive structures there are here mostly work for a social club, so there aren't really that many checks and balances that keep things from drifting further ...
Congratulations on getting a "ban any new user posting the sort of stuff Eugine would post" moderation norm on the way I guess.
This sounds like someone who's salient feature is math anxiety from high school asking how to be a research director at CERN. It's not just that the salient feature seems at odds with the task, it's that the task isn't exactly something you just walk into, while you sound like you're talking about helping someone overcome a social phobia by taking a part-time job at supermarket checkout. Is your friend someone who wins International Math Olympiads?
Maybe someday someone clever will figure out how to disseminate that knowledge, but it simply isn't there yet.
Based on Razib Khan's blog posts, many cutting edge researchers seem to be pretty active on Twitter where they can talk about their own stuff and keep up on what their colleagues are up to. Grad students on social media will probably respond to someone asking about their subfield if it looks like they know their basics and may be up to something interesting.
The tiny bandwidth is of course a problem. "Professor Z has probably proven math lem...
I am quite certain this is very unlikely to become any type of trend (it is certainly possible for outsiders to be great, Ramanujan was an outsider after all).
Not in the present circumstances, no. The interesting thing is if it would strike a match with the current disaffection with academia (perceptions of must-have-bachelor's-for-any-kind-of-job student loan rackets and stressed-out researchers who spend most of their energy gaming administrative systems and grinding out cookie-cutter research tailored to fit standardized bureaucratic metrics for acce...
Yeah, I am sure enough about this not happening that I am willing to place bets. There is an enormous amount of intangibles Coursera can't give you (I agree it can be useful for a certain type of person for certain types of aims).
Agree that being inside academia is probably a lot bigger deal than people outside it really appreciate. We're about to see the first generation that grew up with a really ubiquitous internet come to grad school age though. Currently in addition to the assumption that generally clever people will want to go to university, we've...
Yeah, for some reason I'm not inclined to give very much weight to an event that can't be detected by outside observers at all and which my past, present or future selves can't subjectively observe being about to happen, happening right now or having happened.
You seem to be hung up on either memories or observations being the key to decoding the subjective self. I think that is your error.
This sounds like a thing people who want to explain away subjective consciousness completely are saying. I'm attacking the notion that the annoying mysterious part in...
There is some Buddhist connection, yes. The moments of experience thing is a thing in some meditation styles, and advanced meditators are actually describing something like subjective experience starting to feel like an on/off sequence instead of a continuous flux. Haven't gone really deep into what either the Buddhist metaphysics or the meditation phenomenology says. Neuroscience also has some discrete consciousness steps stuff, but I likewise haven't gone very deep into that. Anyway,
...I'm with them so far. Here's where I get off): All sentient beings are
The strange part that might give your intuition a bit of a shake is that it's not entirely clear how you tell the difference as an inside observer either. The thought experiment wasn't "we're going to start doing this tomorrow night unless you acquiesce", it's "we've been doing this the whole time", and everybody had been living their life exactly as before until told about it. What should you now think of your memories of every previous day and going to sleep each night?
My expounding of the pattern identity theory elsewhere in the comments is probably a textbook example of what Scott Aaronson calls bullet-swallowing, so just to balance things out I'm going to link to Aaronson's paper Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine that sketches a very different attack on standard naive patternism. (Previous LW discussion here)
If pressed, right now I'm leaning towards the matter-based argument, that if consciousness is not magical then it is tied to specific sets of matter. And that a set of matter can not exist in multiple locations. Therefore a single consciousness can not exist in multiple locations. The consciousness A that I am now is in matter A.
So, there are two things we need to track here, and you're not really making a distinction between them. There are individual moments of consciousness, which, yes, probably need to be on a physical substrate that exists in the s...
You're still mostly just arguing for your personal intuition for the continuity theory though. People have been doing that pretty much as long as we've had fiction about uploads or destructive teleportation, with not much progress to the arguments. How would you convince someone sympathetic to the pattern theory that the pattern theory isn't viable?
FWIW, after some earlier discussions about this, I've been meaning to look into Husserl's phenomenology to see if there are some more interesting arguments to be found there. That stuff gets pretty weird and tricky fast though, and might be a dead end anyway.
I'm guessing a part of the point is that nobody had noticed anything (and indeed still can't, at least in any way they could report back) until the arrangement was pointed out, which highlights that there are bits in the standard notion of personal identity that get a bit tricky once you try to get more robust than just going by intuition on them. How do you tell you die when a matrix lord disintegrates you and then puts together an identical copy? How do you tell you don't die when you go under general anesthesia for brain surgery and then wake up?
I see the pattern identity theory, where uploads make sense, as one that takes it as a starting point that you have an unambiguous past but no unambiguous future. You have moments of consciousness where you remember your past, which gives you identity, and lets you associate your past moments of consciousness to your current one. But there's no way, objective or subjective, to associate your present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, if there are multiple such moments, such as a high-fidelity upload and the original perso...
Yes, we do, maybe you'd notice if you didn't shut down your brain whenever you encountered a non-PC idea.
I don't think there's been much elaboration on the ideas that were already floating around here five-ish years ago in the last few years. We've just had the few regulars jumping in with the same message, failing to start much interesting conversation, and growing increasingly cranky.
Making being a reactionary your life's work isn't very rewarding. It's a feature of the present system that proponents who get boring and repetitive get thrown in the wood chipper and more clever and interesting ones take their place, but any single person will get stuck in their old material after a while.
Or because you and Jim are being tedious assholes nobody likes to hang out with, while going on about the same predictable set of not socially acceptable stuff for years and years without having anything new and interesting to say after a while.
In Finland, today, can I just say "I don't feel like working" and get welfare for life?
(Not an expert on this stuff, but here's my rough understanding.)
You get a couple years of pretty straightforward welfare if you quit your job, then it looks like they will start doing means testing (tarveharkinta) on your savings and will stop paying you if it doesn't look like you're living hand-to-mouth. After you've gone through all your savings that the employment office is aware of, I think you can go on living in some sort of rental apartment and get ...
If there was a large dataset of faces shot in a similar way and rated for attractiveness somewhere, you could take a photo of yourself, look for people in the set who look like you (possibly with some sort of face recognition program) and see how they are rated.
I'm still doing this after starting a year ago. I've filled up one large ruled Moleskine and am 50 pages into the second one. I have calendar pages where I don't do any forward planning, but just write a one-line summary of what I worked on that day. Empty lines or variants of "slacking off" are an instant sign of trouble.
Other than that, the nice thing is just that I have a designated single nice journal to do any sort of brainstorming notes I need. Random ideas, planning an ongoing project or reading notes all just start by labeling a new page on the journal and writing down whatever is relevant.
Not exactly, but related: Hugh Everett's' daughter Elizabeth committed suicide in 1996 and wrote in her suicide note that she's going to a parallel universe to be with her father.
No, it's just indicating that I haven't made any sort of concentrated effort at clearing my reading list or maintaining some sort of FIFO discipline on it. The Complete History of the World in Impeccable Engaging Detail tends to not do very well against a Warren Ellis comic book about shooting aliens wearing human skin suits in the head with flesh-eating bullets when picking random media to consume during idle time.
Can't recommend a book I've read, but I've had J.M. Roberts' The New Penguin History of the World on my reading list for a while now. It's more big picture than facts.
If you're after rulers, dates and the like, just diving into wikipedia, starting from high-level articles and taking your own notes might not be a terribly bad approach.
I'd be happy if there was a RSS feed of his publicly visible FB posts.
It's probably a safe assumption that there exists some number of people dedicating their careers to the study of intelligence who are able to consider potential heritability confounders you can think up in five minutes.
Do you already have a track record of getting sizable groups of strangers doing things they wouldn't otherwise have done by influencing them on some other social media? Then it might be worth looking into how to game facebook.
If you don't, then the first question is if you should try to get into the social media influence game to begin with. How many people are trying to do it compared to people who have any traction with a number of followers, and what sets the successful people apart? If most people who don't bounce off right away are barely hanging by i...
Funny thing, the previous person with minimal earlier site presence who came in with "here's how to start properly growing Less Wrong" was also kind of tone-deaf and annoying.
I just found out that some comic books I read in Finnish in the 80s were originally published in English in 1976 in a magazine called Starstream. I re-read the comics, which are an anthology of comic adaptations of various golden age SF short stories. They also mostly stick to the source material, such as John Campbell's Who Goes There, which was also the basis for John Carpenter's The Thing. Generally it's quite a bit better than what you'd expect from "newsstand comic book from 1976", and a lot of the stories are quite weird, from the mix of ou...
Obviously the solution is a smartwatch which pushes retractable needles in a pattern that tells the current time in binary into the skin of your wrist once every minute.
Turns out there is. Probably not all of the programs though.
Are you trying to do something specific or are you just curious about learning about Bayesian statistics? The software on that list probably won't be that useful unless you already know a bit about statistics theory and have a specific problem you want to solve.
It has seemed to me that a lot of the commenters who come with their own solid competency are also less likely to get unquestioningly swept away following EY's particular hobbyhorses.
There's also the whole Lesswrong-is-dying thing that might be contribute to the vibe you're getting. I've been reading the forum for years and it hasn't felt very healthy for a while now. A lot of the impressive people from earlier have moved on, we don't seem to be getting that many new impressive people coming in and hanging out a lot on the forum turns out not to make you that much more impressive. What's left is turning increasingly into a weird sort of cargo cult of a forum for impressive people.
Did any of the really valuable contributors to LW go away because they were driven away by incessant criticism? You think Scott Alexander moved to SSC because he couldn't handle the downvotes?
Didn't Eliezer say somewhere that he posts on Facebook instead of LW nowadays because on LW you get dragged into endless point-scoring arguments with dedicated forum arguers and on Facebook you just block commenters who come off as too tiresome to engage with from your feed?
Mathematicians have come up with formal languages that can, in principle, be used to write proofs in a way that they can be checked by a simple algorithm. However, they're utterly impractical.
I understood that a part of the univalent foundations project is to develop a base formalism for mathematics that's amenable to similar layered abstraction with formal proofs as you can do with programs in modern software engineering. The basic formal language for proofs is like raw lambda calculus, you can see it works in theory but it'd be crazy to write actual s...
Just how bad of an idea is it for someone who knows programming and wants to learn math to try to work through a mathematics textbook with proof exercises, say Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, by learning a formal proof system like Coq and using that to try to do the proof exercises?
I'm figuring, hey, no need to guess whether whatever I come up with is valid or not. Once I get it right, the proof assistant will confirm it's good. However, I have no idea how much work it'll be to get even much simpler proofs that what are expected of the textboo...
Any success stories for signing up for cryonics for people with middle-class wealth who don't have a citizenship in an Anglosphere country?
I've learned that it's probably optimal to strive for the most high-earning high-productivity career you can accomplish and donate your extra income to effective altruism and that I'm not going to go and try to do that.
This isn't working for me as pumping the intuition you seem to want it to. I think life is worth living and I'd just cut to the chase and pick 1 because option 2 doesn't make sense as a way to get more life. Pattern theory of identity, life is a process, not a weighted lump of time-space-matter-stuff where you can just say "let's double the helping" like this. If you run the exact same process twice, that doesn't get you any new patterns and new life compared to just running it once.
Or if the idea is that I'd be aware of having gotten a second ru... (read more)