All of vlad.proex's Comments + Replies

Here's a thought experiment.

In version A, I have a button that non invasively scans my brain and creates 10 perfect copies of my brain state in a computer. I press the button. For an instant, 11 identical mind states exist in the universe. Then each mind starts diverging along different causal chains.

Intuitively, I expect the following:

• I won't experience anything unusual after pressing the button (eg, I won't wake up in a computer). I will still feel that I am in my physical body, in the room with the button
• each of the mind copies will feel that they ar

Nice! Last weekend I expanded https://www.gptrim.com/ to allow the user to a) see savings in both characters and tokens; b) determine their own combination of word processing functions. Then I saw, like you said, that to save tokens you only want to remove stopwords. I will next add the option to remove punctuation. I also want to give users two general recipes: optimize for saving tokens vs. optimize for saving characters. Always happy to take more ideas.

I will probably write again on this, on my new personal Substack or other websites, reporting what I'v... (read more)

I see your point. I think the existing tokenizer is designed to keep all parts of text, while the idea here is to sacrifice some information in favor of compression. But writing this, I also realized that this approach is more effective at saving characters than tokens.

This is what I was hoping for when I wrote this post. Thank you for your insight. 

New position: sometimes when using ChatGPT, you only care about the number of characters, because of the character limit in the chat message. In that case, you want to get rid of spaces. But if you want to save on tokens, you probably should keep spaces. I think the solution is: a) allow the user to choose the mix of transformations for their use case; b) show them how much they are saving in characters and tokens so they can optimize for their use case. 

Free, universal financial tracker.

I wrote an article on this subject (i.e. why do we play zero-sum games while praising positive-sum games?)

https://native-wonder.blogspot.com/2020/12/things-people-want.html

Thank you, this is very useful. Lately I've been interested in programs that are fully online and could be completed in a year. Would you have any recommendations for that?

Wonderful, thank you!

Strongly upvoted. As a Kindle-dependent newcomer who's delving into the classics, this is precious.

I have read RAZ. Does this file include it? I would actually need only the posts that are not there.

Do you plan to do this for other authors?

I had trouble understanding how the different facts and judgments in your post are connected between each other and with the concept of upside decay.

But I want to say that I really appreciate the concept, because something very similar occurred to me once, though at the time I didn't give it a name. I was studying the careers of creative artists, and there is a lot of discrimination in these fields. Against women, against people who start out in less prestigious institutions, and so on.

My idea was that because many people were excluded and diversity... (read more)

Thank you for your questions, they're proving very useful.

But it is interesting to understand, what's happening to other children, who actually do math. Suddenly you realize, that "solving problems" for them is less energy demanding, which is awkward!

I'm not sure this is the case. We're humans, maths is hard for everyone. I imagine it's more about developing an ethics of work early on and being willing to delay gratification and experience unpleasant sensations for the purpose of learning something valuable. Though of co... (read more)

Your position is consistent, though to me somewhat troubling.

I wouldn't equate "unable to have different preferences or to envision a better situation" with "happy". Perhaps Plato's cave applies here. Or consider a child who is born in an underground prison, Banelike, and never sees the light of sun. Who is then offered the opportunity of freedom on the surface and refuses out of fear or ignorance. Would you think they are "happy"? Perhaps, but they could be happier. Or at least they could experience a richer level ... (read more)

I agree with you, though I don't think the linked account expects an "eternal old age"; what made you think that? As I see it, it's actually an argument about the inner experience of humans and how the author thinks we wouldn't be happy with a very long lifespan. I don't agree with the author, but I linked the post as anecdotal evidence that some people who are no longer young may reject the idea of a very long lifespan because of a general feeling of life-weariness (to what extent this feeling is connected to the biological p... (read more)

Personally, I am strongly inclined towards non-interference. I have little trouble accepting that people choose wrong, knowing how fallible I am myself. I also think that, given how complex the universe is for us, it will always be easier to find arguments for inaction than for action.

And this is precisely why I am interested in arguments for interference. Most of the time, the option of non-interference is the easiest for me; which makes me at least a bit suspicious. It makes me wonder: have I carefully considered all the opposing arguments?

'Morali... (read more)

Maybe some kind of social app inspired by liquid democracy/quadratic voting might work?

Do you think it's wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals? I can think of a lot of reasons this could go wrong: cognitive biases, emotional reasoning, ignorance, Dunning–Kruger effect, politically-driven decisions... Just look at what's happening now with cancel culture.

In general this connects to the problem of expertise. If even intellectuals have trouble understanding who among them is worthy of trust and respect, how c... (read more)

TIL 'former' and 'latter' are used to distinguish between two things. Corrected.

The survey is quite simplistic. 19% said "I want to live forever", while 42% said "I want to live longer than a normal lifespan, but not forever". The problem is in the ambiguity. What does 'forever' mean? A million years? Until the heat death of the universe?

And what is 'longer than a normal lifespan'? Ten years longer? A million years longer?

My guess is that most people who chose the second option want to live until they're 100 or something, and that is in fact "longer than the average lifespan" wh... (read more)

The general trend has been to make computers user-friendly, and to hide the complexity from the user. On one hand, this has been helpful for their diffusion, and I'm sure it benefited a lot of people in a lot of ways (besides making a lot of money). If I think of my parents, for instance, I can't believe they would have ever started to use computers had they been more complicated.

On the other hand, this might be the fundamental obstacle in the way of coding literacy. To do stuff in the modern world, you actually have to know how to read and writ... (read more)

To stay on computer science analogies, this reminds me of the principle of abstraction. When you call an API, it sort of feels like magic. A task gets done, and you trust that it was done correctly, and that saves you the time of controlling the code and rewriting it from scratch. "We have only to think out how this is to be done once, and forget then how it is done." (A. Turing, 1947). 

Thank you for the welcome and the feedback! Yes, I am set on deepening my engagement with Reality and tackling more practical tasks. I also want to work on keeping score on my judgments and getting better at detecting & analysing my mistakes. I will definitely write more about it when the moment comes.