All of weathersystems's Comments + Replies

Heh, I got the same feeling from the Dutch people I met. My ex wife once did a corporate training thing where they were learning about the power of "yes and" in improve and in working with others. She and one other European person (from Switzerland maybe?) were both kinda upset about it and decided to turn their improve into a "no but" version.

Ya I definitely took agreeableness == good as just an obvious fact until that relationship.

This isn't as strong of an argument as I once thought

What is the "this" you're referring to? As far as I can tell I haven't presented an argument.

Do you have a link to the job posting?

I would say it feels like my brain's built in values are mostly a big subgoal stomp, of mutually contradictory, inconsistent, and changeable values. [...]

it feels like my brain has this longing to find a small, principled, consistent set of terminal values that I could use to make decisions instead. 

Here's a slate star codex piece on our best guess on how our motivational system works: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/07/guyenet-on-motivation/. It's essentially just a bunch of small mostly independent modules all fighting for control of the body to ... (read more)

Maybe a dumb question. What's an EM researcher? Google search didn't do me any good.

What do you think about the vulnerable world hypothesis? Bostrom defines the vulnerable world hypothesis as: 

If technological development continues then a set of capabilities will at some point be attained that make the devastation of civilization extremely likely, unless civilization sufficiently exits the semian-archic default condition.

(There's a good collection of links about the VWH on the EA forum). And he defines "semi-anarchic default condition" as having 3 features:

1. Limited capacity for preventive policing. States do not have sufficiently r

Do you have anything else you remember about the statement? Where you heard it, when you heard it etc.

I'm not so sure I get your meaning. Is your knowledge of the taste of salt based on communication?

Usually people make precisely the opposite claim. That no amount of communication can teach you what something subjectively feels like if you haven't had the experience yourself.

I do find it difficult to describe "subjective experience" to people who don't quickly get the idea. This is better than anything I could write: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/. 

The quotes above are not the complete conversation. In the section of the discussion about AGI, Blake says:

Blake: Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do. And in that case, we can ask, “Well, might there be a system that is good at all the sorts of tasks that we might want it to do?” Here, we don’t have a mathematical proof, but again, I suspect Yann’s intuition is similar to mine, which is that you could have systems that are good at a remarkably wide range of things, b

Why would self-awareness be an indication of sentience? 

By sentience, do you mean having subjective experience? (That's how I read you)

I just don't see any necessary connection at all between self-awareness and subjective experience. Sometimes they go together, but I see no reason why they couldn't come apart. 

Gary Musk decided

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

I also liked this numberphile video about it: Link

Ah. Ya that makes sense. It sounds like it's not so much about what to do in the moment of panic as what to focus on throughout your day-to-day life. Let yourself be interested in and pay attention to things other than that you feel bad all the time. Don't let your pain be your main/only focus.

I read it as an analogy to a programming stack trace, but with motivations. Often times you're motivated to do A in order to get B in order to get C, where one thing is desired only as a means to get something else. Presumably these chains of desire bottom out in some terminal desires, things that are desired for their own sake, not because of some other thing it gets you.

So one example could be, "I want to get a job, in order to get money, in order to be able to feed myself." 

I'm not sure if that's what they meant. I'm often kind of skeptical of that... (read more)

Thanks for writing this. As someone who went through something very similar, I largely agree with what you wrote here.

To make the "accept the panic" bit a more concrete: following someone's advice, when I'd start to panic, I'd sit down and imagine I was strapped to the chair. I'd imagine my feelings were a giant wave washing over me, but that I couldn't avoid them, because I was strapped to the chair. The wave wouldn't kill me though, just feel uncomfortable. I'd repeat that in my head "this is uncomfortable but not dangerous. this is uncomfortable but not... (read more)

There are a few things that sound similar to what you're talking about. The first is the process of writing an RFC: https://github.com/inasafe/inasafe/wiki/How-to-write-an-RFC. Also wikipedia must need to do many of the things you describe, so looking into how they reach consensus may be interesting for you.  Also, there are attempts to have more of a direct democracy style governance in the US, and they have certain procedures that you may want to look into: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/politics-without-politicians

I do like ... (read more)

Thanks. The "drawing what you see" vs "drawing what you think" distinction combined with the images helped me understand the idea better.

This seems somewhat related to what Scott Alexander called "concept shaped holes." So you're saying that some people have a "concept of how to draw what you see" shaped hole, and that Edwards has some techniques of helping you fill that gap.

Are you specifically looking for conceptual shifts that would allow you to do something better? Or is just being able to understand something you previously didn't understand enough? L... (read more)

Thanks for writing up your thoughts here. I hope you wont mind a little push-back.

There's a premise underlying much of your thought that I don't think is true.

But as the world of Social Studies consists of the interactions of persons, places, and things, they are subject to the Laws of Physics, and so the tenants of Physics must apply.

I don't really see how the laws of physics apply to social interactions. To me it sounds like you're mixing up different levels of description without any reason.

Yes, at bottom we're all made up of physical stuff that physics... (read more)

I think some question in this area would work well for this collaboration I'm proposing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oqSMn6WEXPdDEvyyt/what-question-would-you-like-to-collaborate-on

If you add a question there and it gets picked I'd be happy to work on this with you.

Ya I thought it was worth a try. Looks like exactly one person is putting forward a question so far. Do you have any questions you'd be interested in working on?

Thanks for being the first person to submit a question! 

It turns people who have "no drawing talent" into people who can easily draw anything they see, not by strenuous exercise, but by a conceptual shift that can be achieved in a few hours.

Did that work for you, or do you know of any evidence that that's the case? I'm skeptical that a few hours can allow anyone to "draw anything they see" but would be happy to change my mind on that. I guess you didn't say how well they'd be able to draw after just a few hours of "conceptual shift." But I read you as... (read more)

I'm a bit worried that my question will be picked and then I'll be the only one working on it. So to give this thing a better chance of at least two people collaborating, I'm not submitting a question.

Thanks. I'd heard of wikispore, but not wikifunctions. That looks cool.

"I wrote first wrote"

Thanks for the post!

A really easy way to set up your own wiki is to use a github repo. You can make it private if you don't want people to see it. If you use markdown and use the .md file extension, github will show the pages nicely and will even make links to other pages work.

do you ever go back to old free form notes and find yourself unable to reconstruct what you originally meant?

I don't think I've ever had that problem.

Or find the task of wading through your old free form notes unpleasant, since they're not polished?

I think it's fun. I've never found it unpleasant. And i... (read more)

Also make sure to check out the other posts with the note taking tag if you haven't seen them already: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/note-taking

Thx. I'll check it out.

I agree. My two questions with regards to that are:
 

1. Would they accept this as a sister project? The last time they took on a sister project was something like 10 years ago (iirc)
2. Would it be better placed as it's own Wikimedia project or could it be merged with Wikiversity?

StackExchange only flags duplicates, that's true, but the reason is so that search is more efficient, not less. The duplicate serves as a signpost pointing to the canonical question.

Ya I get that. But why keep all the answers and stuff from the duplicates? My idea with the question wiki was to keep the duplicate question page (because maybe it's worded a bit differently and would show up differently in searches), have a pointer to the canonical question, and remove the rest of the content on that page, combining it with the canonical question page.

Also, St

Ya I think you're basically right here. Which is why I'm not really hoping to "grow large enough to be comparable to Stack Exchange and still remain good." In fact even growing large enough and being sucky seems very hard.

My goal is just to make something that's useful to individuals. I figure if I get use out of the thing when working alone, maybe other people would too.

I'm not sure I'm getting your question.

I think mediawiki (the software that runs both wikipedia and this question wiki) only allows text by default. But there's no reason why the pages can't just link to relevant sources. And in fact probably some questions should be answered with just one link to the relevant wikipedia page. 

Ideally pages should synthesize relevant sources but I think just listing sources is better than nothing.

Ah ya I see what you're saying. Ya that's definitely right. Certainly the most common kind of question asker online just wants to ask the highest number of the most qualified people their question and that's it. Unless/until the site has a large user base that won't really be possible on the wiki.

Still, I think as long as the thing is useful to some people it may be able to grow. But it may be useful to organize my thoughts better on exactly what the value is for single users.

One example that comes to mind is the polymath project. They found it useful to start a wiki to organize their projects. If anyone else wants to come along and do a similar thing, they can just use this wiki instead of making their own.

By "network effect" do you mean this? I take the network effect to be a problem here only if the wiki requires a large amount of people to be useful. 

My hope is that the wiki should be useful even for a very small number of people. For example, I get use out of it myself just as a place to put some notes that I want to show to people and as a way of organizing my own questions.

Hi y'all.

Recently I've become very interested in open research. A friend of mine gave me the tip to check out lesswrong. 

I found that lesswrong has been interested in trying to support collaborative open research (one, two, three) for a few years at least. That was the original idea behind lesswrong.com/questions. Recently Ruby explained some of their problems getting this sort of thing going with the previous approach and sketched a feature he's calling "Research Agendas." I think something like his Research Agendas seems quite useful. 

So that's... (read more)

I added in a few more of the questions from the template that seem relevant. Including the one about possible difficulties. I think what's there cover's your trade-off.

I was thinking that the template would be something where you could just keep the sections that seem relevant and delete the rest. 

But I guess even that would start to get annoying if the thing was super long. That's a good consideration to keep in mind.

I added "Given these problems, why are people still tolerating the status quo (if they are)?" to the template. Does that capture your idea well enough?

You have spelled "stakeholders" as "steak-holders", which is charming but may reduce credibility in some circumstances.

Heh. Funny mistake. Thanks.

A suggested improvement to the template: When examining the status quo, also ask "for what related problems does the status quo have a built-in solution?".

I want to make sure I understand your point here. Is the idea that sometimes we see that a system isn't solving some problem well enough, and so try to fix it. But we don't take into account the fact that the system isn't just trying to solve that problem, but ... (read more)