All of tcheasdfjkl's Comments + Replies

I like this post. But also the part of it I found most interesting was this footnote bit:

Loosely speaking, you've just turned your own conscious mind into an internal hostile telepath!

bc I think I do that kind of a lot, but also am somewhat sensitive to at least some kinds of things that feel like self-deception or thought-avoidance, and really dislike that feeling, so I do tend to probe at things that feel suspicious in that kind of way, which sometimes adds up to pretty unhelpful thought spirals where I'm chasing my thoughts and emotions around and getti... (read more)

no it feels scarier! I think if I'm interacting with a real live human being in person I basically always instinctively worry about what they think of me even if there's no strong reason to, and higher uncertainty about what they think of me is more worry-causing; with friends I can somewhat lean on "well they are continuing to be friends with me so they must not be judging me too badly", and also friends have often disclosed similar vulnerable things to me which makes it easier (I am somewhat more hesitant to share productivity details with friends who I ... (read more)

I also have found I am way more productive when I can do something like this, and kind of want to figure out how to do more of it. Some things that make it harder than it seems like it should be:

  • NDAs and such
  • the things I most need help thinking about are usually also ones that it feels very vulnerable/kind of scary to bring someone else into
  • and/or are ones where domain knowledge is important, such that I'd want to ideally work with someone who knows stuff about it
  • general feeling of privacy/hesitation putting another human in my workflows because my wo
... (read more)
2Raemon
I'd sort of naively guess doing it with a stranger (esp. one not even in your circles) would be easier on the "feeling private/anxious about your productivity" – does that feel like it wouldn't work?

I think the first time I encountered this post I had some kind of ~distaste for, idk, the idea that my beliefs and my aesthetics need have anything to do with each other? Maybe something about, protecting my right to like things aesthetically for arbitrary reasons without feeling like they need to fit into my broader value system in some coherent way, and/or to believe things without worrying about their aesthetics? whereas now I guess my... aesthetics, in this post's frame... have evolved to... idk, be more okay integrating these things with each other? h... (read more)

I think, for me, memory is not necessary for observation, but it is necessary for that observation to... go anywhere, become part of my overall world model, interact with other observations, become something I know?

and words help me stick a thing in my memory, because my memory for words is much better than my memory for e.g. visuals.

I guess that means the enduring world maps I carry around in my head are largely made of words, which lowers their fidelity compared to if I could carry around full visual data? But heightens their fidelity compared to when I ... (read more)

for some reason these crows made me laugh uncontrollably

This is great, thank you.

I didn't quite understand how "Beware ratchet effects" fits into/connects with the rest of the section that it's in - could you spell that out a bit? Also I'm curious if there are concrete examples of that happening that you know about & can share, though ofc very reasonable if not.

oh yeah my dispute isn't "the character in the song isn't talking about building AI" but "the song is not a call to accelerate building AI"

as Solstice creative lead I neither support nor oppose tearing apart the sun for raw materials

Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has "a coder" dismantling the sun "in another twenty years with some big old computer." This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions.

Super disagree with this! Neither I nor (I have not checked but am pretty certain) the author of the text wants to advocate that! (Indeed I somewhat actively tried to avoid having stuff in my program encourage this! You could argue that even though I tried to do this I did not succeed, but I think the fact that you seem to be reading ~motivati... (read more)

8Jeffrey Heninger
I think you should ask the author of the song if it's referring to someone using powerful AI to do something transformative to the sun. This is extremely obvious to me. The song is opposed to how the sun currently is, calling it "wasteful" and "distasteful" - the second word is a quote from a fictional character, but the first is not. It later talks about when "the sun's a battery," so something about the sun is going to change. I really don't know what "some big old computer" could be referring to if not powerful AI.

re point 1 - maybe? unsure

[edit: one issue is that some irregularities will in fact be correlated across takes and STILL shouldn't be written down - like, sometimes a song will slow down gradually over the course of a couple measures, and the way to deal with that is to write the notes as though no slowdown is happening and then write "rit." (means "slow down") over the staff, NOT to write gradually longer notes; this might be tunable post facto but I think that itself would take human (or really good AI) judgment that's not necessarily much easier than ju... (read more)

As someone who likes transcribing songs,

1) I endorse the above

2) if you ask me to transcribe a song I will often say yes (if it's not very frequent) (it costs time but not that much cognitive work for me so I experience reasonable amounts of this as fun)

One thing that makes this hard to automate is human imprecision in generating a recording, espeically with rhythm: notes encode frequencies but also timings and durations, and humans performing a song will never get those things exactly precise (nor should they - good performance tends to involve being a little free with rhythms in ways that shouldn't be directly reflected in the sheet music), so any automatic transcriber will get silly-looking slightly off rhythms that still need judgment to adjust.

2Said Achmiz
This seems solvable by using multiple recordings and averaging, yes? Also, if the transcription to sheet-music form is accurate w.r.t. the recording, and the recording is acceptable w.r.t. the intended notes, then the transcription ought to be close enough to the intended notes. Or am I misunderstanding?

Oh, also I wanted to comment on the section of your other post where you mention that Solstice contained a number of what felt like barbs at religion.

This is a fairly valid complaint, I think. I am sorry you felt barbed. I agree that barbs at the outgroup are not a great Solstice strategy; I specifically aimed to keep conflict-theoretic content out of my program (and edited e.g. some of the Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful accordingly). I think these were less salient to me for basically cultural and positional reasons, and it makes sense they were much m... (read more)

0the gears to ascension
seems like it goes against the rationalist virtue of changing ones' mind to refuse to change a song because everyone likes it the way it is.
tcheasdfjkl23-4

[note: I initially read this post like a month ago, forgot to comment, have not reread now before commenting]

Thanks for writing this, as the creative lead I really like seeing what people think!

I like your geological review of Song Of The Artesian Water. (I also like your factual nitpick of Bold Orion, elsewhere.)

I want to somewhat disagree with some of your overall approach to the content of Solstice, largely exemplified here:

There is a phenomenon in comparative theology where people are much more sensitive to whether the theology is correct in a talk tha

... (read more)
6Jeffrey Heninger
Thank you for responding! I am being very critical, both in foundational and nitpicky ways. This can be annoying and make people want to circle the wagons. But you and the other organizers are engaging constructively, which is great. The distinction between Solstice representing a single coherent worldview vs. a series of reflections also came up in comments on a draft. In particular, the Spinozism of Songs Stay Sung feels a lot weirder if it is taken as the response to the darkness, which I initially did, rather than one response to the darkness. Nevertheless, including something in Solstice solidly establishes it as a normal / acceptable belief for rationalists: within the local Overton Window. You might not be explicitly telling people that they ought to believe something, but you are telling that it is acceptable for high status people in their community to believe it. I am concerned that some of these beliefs are even treated as acceptable. Take Great Transhumanist Future. It has "a coder" dismantling the sun "in another twenty years with some big old computer." This is a call to accelerate AI development, and use it for extremely transformative actions. Some of the organizers believe that this is the sort of thing that will literally kill everyone. Even if it goes well, it would make life as it currently exists on the surface of the Earth impossible. Life could still continue in other ways, but some of us might want to still live here in 20 years.[1] I don't think that reckless AI accelerationism should be treated as locally acceptable. The line in Brighter Than Today points in the same way. It's not only anti-religious. It is also disparaging towards people who warn about the destructive potential of a new technology. Is that an attitude we want to establish as normal? If the main problem with changing the songs is in making them scan and rhyme, then I can probably just pay that cost. This isn't a thing I'm particularly skilled at, but there are people w
2tcheasdfjkl
Oh, also I wanted to comment on the section of your other post where you mention that Solstice contained a number of what felt like barbs at religion. This is a fairly valid complaint, I think. I am sorry you felt barbed. I agree that barbs at the outgroup are not a great Solstice strategy; I specifically aimed to keep conflict-theoretic content out of my program (and edited e.g. some of the Underrated Reasons To Be Thankful accordingly). I think these were less salient to me for basically cultural and positional reasons, and it makes sense they were much more salient to you. It's also the case that there's not much I would do differently even knowing in advance that someone would have this reaction, because (a) I disagree with some of the examples, (b) nearly all of the examples are in songs, written by people other than me, and already known and beloved within the community, and as such very difficult to change. (The one example that's not from a song I think you may have misheard - what I said there was "this next song started as a sort of, intra-religious rebuttal against overly literalist interpretations of the Bible", which is not anti-religious.) I guess I also draw a distinction between rejecting some religious practices and being mean to religious people. The Brighter Than Today verse is very much a thing I wouldn't write that way myself but will by no means change because everybody is extremely attached to it. (I've heard a very similar complaint about it from a very secular friend, and I think you and she are basically right but I don't disagree with the song strongly enough to refuse to sing it as is.) But like I do think there is pretty substantial validity to your feeling here anyway, especially given that it is not uncommon for rationalists to be much more antitheist and anti-religious-people than this. Sorry about that.

I notice that you have a lot of specific examples of bad answers but no specific examples of good answers - are good answers just obviously good, or are ~all answers not specifically called out as bad answers generally good, or something else? Would be curious to see some examples of good answers.

Some lyric change ideas tossed around in a brainstorming session in the choir Discord:

  • fjords and empires and all
  • glaciers, sovereigns and all
  • states and seas and stones and all
  • seas and sovereigns and all
  • seas and pyramids and all
2Jeffrey Heninger
I'm currently leaning towards * kings and commonwealths and all

You don't necessarily have to have every individual person showing up every week, though, just often enough that the thing happens in aggregate. Choir manages weekly during concert season and biweekly the rest of the time! D&D groups often manage weekly. It's still hard but it's not, like, completely obviously impossible like "every person shows up every week".

I think in addition to the "specific individual people I've personally hurt" case, there's the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I've made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn't give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a)... (read more)

1benjaminikuta
Thanks! 

This was so adorable I showed it to all my housemates and we read the book aloud together.

(Note for any future Solstice historians that this is not the full program! Also any future Solstice historians should bug me to put the program up on https://secularsolstice.github.io/ if I have not yet done this by January or so.)

A cool thing about the amount of critical mass we have in Berkeley is that we can do things like have a rationalist choir! And more generally a rationalist culture, things like "songs everyone knows and will sing along with if I have a singing night", and a large set of people to find friendships and relationships in if one is picky, etc. It does have the drawback that it's easy to get stuck in a local optimum of only hanging out with rationalists, which is suboptimal in some ways. But the benefits are also pretty substantial imo.

What does "somatically aware" mean here?

I think there's also a constructive kind of "not feeling totally safe" where you know that the future is unknown and you could lose the things you have and it is worth both putting in some effort to make that less likely and to cherish and enjoy what you have now. But yeah, it shouldn't be a high-alert state, and I'm not really sure how to better describe the thing that it is instead.

I have not read all the words in this comment section, let alone in all the linked posts, let alone in their comments sections, but/and - it seems to me like there's something wrong with a process that generates SO MANY WORDS from SO MANY PEOPLE and takes up SO MUCH PERSON-TIME for what is essentially two people not getting along. I get that an individual social conflict can be a microcosm of important broader dynamics, and I suspect that Duncan and/or Said might find my "not getting along" summary trivializing, which may even be true, as noted I haven't read all the words - just, still, is this really the best thing for everyone involved to be doing with their time?

4Viliam
It is already happening, so the choices are either one big thread, or dozen (not much) smaller ones.
3TekhneMakre
Or at least, if there's something so compelling-in-some-way going on for some people that they want to keep engaging, at least we could hope that somehow they could be facilitated in doing mental work that will be helpful for whatever broader things there are. Like, if it's a microcosm of stuff, if it represents some important trends, if there's something important but hard to see without trying really hard, then it might be good for them to focus on that rather than being in a fight. (Of course, easier said than done(can); a lot of the ink spilled will feel like trying to touch on the broader things, but only some of it actually will.)

Interesting, I was thinking of that as basically in the same category as "persistent insistent frames"!

There's also some kind of thing about "when is it okay to just have a frame and not particularly try to make space for other frames, and when isn't it". I think "in your own blog post" is probably a place where it's basically fine to just have/present your own frame (ditto for, like, a song); in contrast to a conversation with another person where it's supposed to be a collaborative thing and instead one person kinda sets the frame. Though I guess there are sometimes blog posts that strike me as excessively stuck in one frame and/or exert pressure to fall in line with that frame - just, the threshold for that is maybe higher than for behavior in conversations.

3Raemon
This line makes me realize I was missing one subcomponent of frame control. We have * Strong frames * Persistent Insistent Frames * Manipulating frames (i.e. tricking people into adopting a new frame) But then there's "pressure/threaten someone into adopting a frame". The line between pressure and "merely expressing confidence" might feel blurry in some cases, but the difference is intended to be "there's an implication that if you don't adopt the frame, you will be socially punished". 

This post is a weird experience. It makes mostly reasonable claims but it's aggressively objectifying-male-gaze-y in a really unpleasant way and I strongly feel that content with that property should not be on LW without at minimum content warnings to that effect (which in this case would, uh, need to come before the title somehow) but preferably at all.

(Trying to say more about that intuition:

  • it feels like it assumes the audience will be male (and having LW contain posts that are assumed-male-audience feels quite Unwelcoming (this word is overused but I
... (read more)
4Jacob Falkovich
I understand where you're coming from, but I think that norms about e.g. warning people about writing from an objectionable frame only makes sense for personal blogs and it's not a very reasonable expectation for a forum like LessWrong. These things are always very subjective (the three women I sent this post to for review certainly didn't feel that it assumed a male audience!). While a single author can create a shared expectation of what they mean by e.g. "warning: sexualizing" with their readers I don't think a whole community can or should try to formalize this as a norm. Which means that it's on the reader to look out for themselves. I'm not going to put content warnings on my writing, but if you decide based on this post that you will not read anything written by me that's tagged "sex and gender" that's fair. 
1Tego
This is a much more elegant way of making the criticism I was vaguely gesturing at in my comment. It's not an objectively bad post, but I agree it feels something like unwelcoming

heh, basically all of the things you note as problems are things that make me actively enjoy the song more! I find the enjambment & mild irregularities & unexpected rhymes clever and fun. agree they add complexity but also that it's okay for this song to be a bit complex (though I'm somewhat biased towards cooler-and-more-complex things since I'm a choir-type person)

I think relentlessness can also be a bad way to learn childrearing, if the child takes more spoons than you've got and you start doing really bad at it and end up abusing or neglecting your child or yourself.

2Raemon
Seems right, but, also, like, the point is that you don't really get the option. (I guess this is compatible with the other part of the post, about being a subsistence farmer or sailor)

Yeah I think this is somewhat implied and I certainly don't take you to be saying the opposite of it, though I think it would be useful to state this more explicitly as well.

(But also I think how deterring a punishment people find this varies by person; there's definitely situations where I think it would be better to just do the rude thing but this is extremely hard to do because that punishment feels Very Bad.)

I like this. Also I think this is a "some people need diametrically opposite advice from other people" thing - some people need to be shown that "this is rude" is a valid kind of judgment to make, other people need to be shown that it's okay and good to do rude things sometimes (which is also true imo). (I think I'm natively more in the second group.)

4Raemon
Perhaps yet another thing I was unclear about: The whole reason I like the concept of rudeness as a game mechanic is that it’s a fairly soft punishment, and this allows you to be so rude things when the situation calls for it.

Ahhh I see, I missed that it was 8pm-8pm, not midnight to midnight, thanks.

Wait, is it down? I can see the front page fine without using any workarounds

2Zach Stein-Perlman
Petrov Day ended two hours ago.

Yeah, I think the reason sexual abuse is wrong is because it has an unacceptably high risk of traumatizing someone, not because it always in all cases does. (Sort of like drunk driving.)

I think this is just one particular subcase of "strong urges are hard not to follow" (other examples: cravings for food one knows is long-term unhealthy; some instances of procrastination (choosing a short-term fun activity over a long-term beneficial one when you don't endorse that); sexual arousal (separate from romantic feelings); being tired/sleepy when you endorse doing stuff that requires overriding that). It certainly is a notable subcase of that, though. I've sometimes described having crushes as having my utility function hijacked (though in a way I usually endorse - I tend to be pretty aligned across versions of myself on this axis).

3Raemon
Hmm. I do think it's interesting to compare this to other strong-cravings, I agree it shares similarity there. I think what makes limerence stand out to me here is that it's not a default part of my day-to-day life. While small-bouts of attraction/lust might come up fairly frequently, mutual attraction is rare enough, and intense/punctuated enough, that I (and others I've seen) are more "caught off guard" than they are with hunger.

I do think that if I did this my responses would be more biased than yours because I would not be willing to send the survey to all the people I have contact info for, in part due to concerns kind of like this. But even biased data would still be interesting and useful, probably.

I'm now tempted to run such a survey of my own...

9Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I certainly think there are people for whom this would be a bad idea, and I certainly think one should first pause to ponder the impact on the potential respondents (I had several layers of easing into the topic, from email subject line to email message saying "there's a survey" to then the survey itself, and this was still not quite enough to prevent one person on my list from having a Rough Day as a result). But in general, i.e. for more than half the people out there, I think this is a really powerful learning experience and a good thing to at least consider trying.  I very much am glad I did this and I think most of the people I know personally would benefit if they did it, too.

Copying over some thoughts from a text conversation I had about this post, since that’s easier than writing them up properly. Adding section headers for readability; utterances not marked “[friend]: “ are mine.
-------------------

0. beginning

[friend]: I like this!  In particular I like the concept that it's reasonable to have beliefs that you can't prove on request, because the internet often assumes it's not

[friend]: (but also yeah, it's very important to note that if you have those then you shouldn't expect other people to take them on faith)

yeahhh

I ... (read more)

This reminds me strongly of the concept of Radical Acceptance, which comes from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and which I agree is often a necessary part of seeing and engaging with reality as it is. (Perhaps, more specifically, grieving as described here is an example of a way to achieve radical acceptance?)

1H.Leslie
In a related way, it reminds me of IFS parts therapy and healing (which still seems kind of like magic to me).
9Raemon
Yeah, does seem related. I've come to find that grieving is sort of a particular flavor of approach to accomplish a bunch of other rationality techniques.

This reads as a rewrite of (some parts of?) the punch bug post (which I didn't like at the time) with several years' more wisdom. I really appreciate the careful precise delineation of the exact things you do and don't mean; I think this works very well here.

To be clear, I think I have zero percent shifted my sense of, like, what's good and healthy, or what society is doing to people, or what the tradeoffs are, or whatever, since punch bug.  I haven't updated any of the underlying models (e.g. I reread punch bug and don't think any of the sections are wrong).  To the extent that you're seeing added wisdom, I would guess it's mostly in being more skilled at not running afoul of people's triggers.

Sometimes kind of! Though I wouldn't say it's "bogus" for me exactly, just that there tends to be a tradeoff between time spent planning/reflecting vs. time spent taking concrete actions, and I'm somewhat prone to a bias in favor of the former - but I do think most of the time when I do this kind of thinking I do find it useful, it just isn't always the most useful thing I could be doing.

Also sometimes the stuff on my mind that I feel I Must think about is not actually related to the stuff I'm trying to concretely make progress on, but is separately useful to think about. Here too I don't always think this type of reflection is the most useful thing for me to do right then, but it's sometimes hard not to.

Hmm, I agree that the thing you describe is a problem, and I agree with some of your diagnosis, but I think your diagnosis focuses too much on a divide between different Kinds Of People, without naming the Kinds Of People explicitly but kind of sounding (especially in the comments) like a lot of what you're talking about is a difference in how much Rationality Skill people have, which I think is not the right distinction? Like I think I am neither a hyper-analytic programmer (certainly not a programmer) nor any kind of particularly Advanced rationalist, an... (read more)

Sometimes I'll be distracted by a thought or feeling or event and feel like I can't move forward with whatever I was doing until I sit down and process it (usually in writing, often in a small Discord channel). Sometimes I will procrastinate on work and the way I will do that will be talking about whatever's on my mind. In general I tend to have a strong urge to talk about/write down my thoughts and poke at them until they make more sense to me.

(It does also happen that instead I avoid doing this with some kinds of things, and it's not good for me, and that does especially happen if I'm extra busy with other stuff, I guess.)

(which isn't to say that I wouldn't benefit from doing more of it, or that I don't do more of it when I have more slack. but I don't think it disproportionately suffers relative to my other priorities.)

Huh, interesting! I think to some extent the way my mind works forces me to fairly often spend time on #3 even when low on slack, even sometimes at the expense of the other things. So for me your initial reasoning feels more applicable.

1tcheasdfjkl
(which isn't to say that I wouldn't benefit from doing more of it, or that I don't do more of it when I have more slack. but I don't think it disproportionately suffers relative to my other priorities.)
2Raemon
Interesting! I'm curious for, like, a description of the qualia of that while it's happening.

Copying over some free-form thoughts from Discord about ways this post feels relevant to my life:

-----

one thing this makes me think of is how my action menu shrunk to like five things in fall 2020

because there was covid and that severely limited the available activities, and then I moved and then, before I had unpacked, found out I have to soon move again, so I couldn't access most of my stuff OR most of my space since it was taken up by boxes, and then also some of the time the air was poison so going outside was also not very much an option

and then I thi... (read more)

I read this a few months ago and thought about it out loud in a Discord channel with the intent to turn my thoughts into a nicely structured comment here eventually, and then I never ended up doing that. So instead I'm going to do a lower-effort version of that, where I more or less copy my thoughts from Discord with only light editing, because that seems better than nothing. I'll put in section headers for readibility, also.

0. start

this is a really good post imo

and one that's relevant to me
[due to the fact that I often have low/fluctuating levels of energ... (read more)

I read about half this post before realizing that this concept is intuitively familiar to me from the process of translating poems/songs: very often a poem or song will have certain specific bits that are going to be extra important to get exactly right (e.g. the title, or something conceptually loadbearing, or a particularly clever or emotionally impactful line) or unusually hard for some reason (e.g. it's trying to get across a very specific or finicky or culturally specific concept, or using clever wordplay, or it's self-referential like "a fourth, a fi... (read more)

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