I'm an independent researcher currently working on a sequence of posts about consciousness. You can send me anonymous feedback here: https://www.admonymous.co/rafaelharth. If it's about a post, you can add [q] or [nq] at the end if you want me to quote or not quote it in the comment section.
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I don't think I get it. If I read this graph correctly, it seems to say that if you let a human play chess against an engine and want it to achieve equal performance, then the amount of time the human needs to think grows exponentially (as the engine gets stronger). This doesn't make sense if extrapolated downward, but upward it's about what I would expect. You can compensate for skill by applying more brute force, but it becomes exponentially costly, which fits the exponential graph.
It's probably not perfect -- I'd worry a lot about strategic mistakes in the opening -- but it seems pretty good. So I don't get how this is an argument against the metric.
Should I not have began by talking about background information & explaining my beliefs? Should I have the audience had contextual awareness and gone right into talking about solutions? Or was the problem more along the lines of writing quality, tone, or style?
- What type of post do you like reading?
- Would it be alright if I asked for an example so that I could read it?
This is a completely wrong way to think about it, imo. A post isn't this thing with inherent terminal value that you can optimize for regardless of content.
If you think you have an insight that the remaining LW community doesn't have, then and only then[1] should you consider writing a post. Then the questions become is the insight actually valid, and did I communicate it properly. And yes, the second one is huge topic -- so if in fact you have something value to say, then sure you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do that, and what e.g. Lsuser said is fine advise. But first you need to actually have something valuable to say. If you don't, then the only good action is to not write a post. Starting off by just wanting to write something is bound to be not-fruitful.
yes technically there can be other goals of a post (like if it's fiction), but this is the central case ↩︎
To I guess offer another data point, I've had an obsessive nail-removing[1] habit for about 20 years. I concur that it can happen unconsciously; however noticing it seems to me like 10-20% of the problem; the remaining 80-90% is resisting the urge to follow the habit when you do notice. (As for enjoying it, I think technically yeah but it's for such a short amount of time that it's never worth it. Maybe if you just gave in and were constantly biting instead of trying to resist for as long as possible, it'd be different.) I also think I've solved the noticing part without really applying any specific technique.
But I don't think this means the post can't still be valuable for cases where noticing is the primary obstacle.
I'm not calling it nail-biting bc it's not about the biting itself, I can equally remove them with my other fingernails. ↩︎
Again, those are theories of consciousness, not definitions of consciousness.
I would agree that people who use consciousness to denote the computational process vs. the fundamental aspect generally have different theories of consciousness, but they're also using the term to denote two different things.
(I think this is bc consciousness notably different from other phenomena -- e.g., fiber decreasing risk of heart disease -- where the phenomenon is relatively uncontroversial and only the theory about how the phenomenon is explained is up for debate. With consciousness, there are a bunch of "problems" about which people debate whether they're even real problems at all (e.g., binding problem, hard problem). Those kinds of disagreements are likely causally upstream of inconsistent terminology.)
For those who work on Windows, a nice little quality of life improvement for me was just to hide desktop icons and do everything by searching in the task bar. (Would be even better if the search function wasn't so odd.) Been doing this for about two years and like it much more.
Maybe for others, using the desktop is actually worth it, but for me, it was always cluttering up over time, and the annoyance over it not looking the way I want always outweighed the benefits. It really takes barely longer to go CTRL+ESC+"firef"+ENTER than to double click an icon.