HOLY shit! I just checked out the new concepts portion of the site that shows you all the tags. This feels like a HUGE step in the direction the LW team's vision of a place where knowledge production can actually happen. 

I've recently re-read Lou Keep's Uruk series, and a lot more ideas have clicked together. I'm going to briefly summarize each post (hopefully will tie things together if you have read them, might not make sense if you haven't). This is also a mini-experiment in using comments to make a twitter-esque idea thread.

Over the past few months I've noticed a very consistent cycle.

1. Notice something fishy about my models
2. Struggle and strain until I was able to formulate the extra variable/handle needed to develop the model
3. Re-read an old post from the sequences and realize "Oh shit, Eliezer wrote a very lucid description of literally this exact same thing."

What's surprising is how much I'm surprised by how much this happens.

Here's a pattern I'm noticing more and more: Gark makes a claim. Tlof doesn't have any particular contradictory beliefs, but takes up argument with Gark, because (and this is the actual-source-of-behavior because) the claim pattern matches, "Someone trying to lay claim to a tool to wield against me", and people often try to get claims "approved" to be used against the other.

Tlof behavior is a useful adaptation to a combative conversational environment, and has been normalized to feel like a "simple disagreement". Even in high trust scenarios, Tlof by habit continues to follow conversational behaviors that get in the way of good truth seeking.

Sketch of a post I'm writing:

"Keep your identity small" by Paul Graham $$\cong$$ "People get stupid/unreasonable about an issue when it becomes part of their identity. Don't put things into your identity."

"Do Something vs Be Someone" John Boyd distinction.

I'm going to think about this in terms of "What is one's main strategy to meet XYZ needs?" I claim that "This person got unreasonable because their identity was under attack" is more a situation of "This person is panicing at the possibility that their main strategy to meet XYZ need will fail."

Me growing up: I made effort to not specifically "identify" with any group or ideal. Also, my main strategy for meeting social needs was "Be so casually impressive that everyone wants to be my friend." I can't remember an instance of this, but I bet I would have looked like "My identity was under attack" if someone starting saying something that undermined that strategy of mine. Being called boring probably would have been terrifying.

"Keep your identity small" is not actionable advice. The target should be more "... (read more)

Lol, one reason it's hard to talk to people about something I'm working through when there's a large inferential gap, is that when they misunderstand me and tell me what I think I sometimes believe them.

I'm torn on WaitButWhy?s new series The Story of Us. My initial reaction was mostly negative. Most of that came from not liking the frame of Higher Mind and Primitive Mind, as that sort of thinking has been reasonable for a lot of hiccups for me, making "doing what I want" and unnecessarily antagonistic process. And then along the way I see plenty of other ways I don't like how he slices up the world.

The torn part: maybe this is sorta post "most people" need to start bridging the inferential gap towards what I consider good epistemology? I expect most people on LW to find his series too simplistic, but I wonder if his posts would do more good than the Sequences for the average joe. As I'm writing this I'm acutely aware of how little I know about how "most people" think.

It also makes me think about how at some point in recent years I thought, "More dumbed down simplifications of crazy advanced math concepts should exist, to get more people a little bit closer to all the cool stuff there is." I guessed a mathematician might balk at this suggestion ("Don't tarnish my precious precision!") Am I reacting the same way?

I dunno, what do you think?

Memex Thread:

I've taken copious notes in notebooks over the past 6 years, I've used evernote on and off as a capture tool for the past 4 years, and for the past 1.5 years I've been trying to organize my notes via a personal wiki. I'm in the process of switching and redesigning systems, so here's some thoughts.

Noticing an internal dynamic.

As a kid I liked to build stuff (little catapults, modify nerf guns, sling shots, etc). I entered a lot of those projects with the mindset of "I'll make this toy and then I can play with it forever and never be bored again!" When I would make the thing and get bored with it, I would be surprised and mildly upset, then forget about it and move to another thing. Now I think that when I was imagining the glorious cool toy future, I was actually imagining a having a bunch of friends to play with (didn't live around many other kids).

When I got to middle school and highschool and spent more time around other kids, the idea of "That person's talks like they're cool but they aren't." When I got into sub-cultures centering around a skill or activity (magic) I experienced the more concentrated form, "That person acts like they're good at magic, but couldn't do a show to save their life."

I got the message, "To fit in, you have to really be about the thing. No half assing it. No posing."

Why, historically, have I gotten so worried when my interests shift? I'm not yet at a point in my lif... (read more)

tldr;

In high-school I read pop cogSci books like "You Are Not So Smart" and "Subliminal: How the Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior". I learned that "contrary to popular belief", your memory doesn't perfectly capture events like a camera would, but it's changed and reconstructed every time you remember it! So even if you think you remember something, you could be wrong! Memory is constructed, not a faithful representation of what happened! AAAAAANARCHY!!!

Wait a second, a camera doesn't perfectly capture events. Or at least, they definitely didn't when t

Over this past year I've been thinking more in terms of "Much of my behavior exists because it was made as a mechanism to meet a need at some point."

Ideas that flow out of this frame seem to be things like Internal Family Systems, and "if I want to change behavior, I have to actually make sure that need is getting met."

Question: does anyone know of a source for this frame? Or at least writings that may have pioneered it?

The general does not exist, there are only specifics.

If I have a thought in my head, "Texans like their guns", that thought got there from a finite amount of specific interactions. Maybe I heard a joke about texans. Maybe my family is from texas. Maybe I hear a lot about it on the news.

"People don't like it when you cut them off mid sentence". Which people?

At a local meetup we do a thing called encounter groups, and one rule of encounter groups is "there is no 'the group', just individual people". Having conversations in that mode has been incredibly helpful to realize that, in fact, there is no "the group".

What are the barriers to having really high "knowledge work output"?

I'm not capable of "being productive on arbitrary tasks". One winter break I made a plan to apply for all the small $100 essay scholarships people were always telling me no one applied for. After two days of sheer misery, I had to admit to myself that I wasn't able be productive on a task that involved making up bullshit opinions about topics I didn't care about.

Conviction is important. From experiments with TAPs and a recent bout of meditation, it seems ... (read more)

I'm in the process of turning this thought into a full essay.

Ideas that are getting mixed together:

Cached thoughts, Original Seeing, Adaption Executors not Fitness Maximizes, Motte and Bailey, Double Think, Social Improv Web.

• A mind can perform original seeing (to various degrees), and it can also use cached thoughts.
• Cache thoughts are more “Procedural instruction manuals” and original seeing is more “Your true anticipations of reality”.
• Both reality and social reality (social improv web) apply pressures and rewards that shape your cached thoughts.
• It

I started writing on LW in 2017, 64 posts ago. I've changed a lot since then, and my writing's gotten a lot better, and writing is becoming closer and closer to something I do. Because of [long detailed personal reasons I'm gonna write about at some point] I don't feel at home here, but I have a lot of warm feelings towards LW being a place where I've done a lot of growing :)

A forming thought on post-rationality. I've been reading more samzdat lately and thinking about legibility and illegibility. Me paraphrasing one point from this post:

State driven rational planning (episteme) destroys local knowledge (metis), often resulting in metrics getting better, yet life getting worse, and it's impossible to complain about this in a language the state understands.

The quip that most readily comes to mind is "well if rationality is about winning, it sounds like the state isn't being very rational, and this isn'... (read more)

Sometimes when I talk to friends about building emotional strength/resilience, they respond with "Well I don't want to become a robot that doesn't feel anything!" to paraphrase them uncharitably.

I think wolverine is a great physical analog for how I think about emotional resilience. Every time wolverine gets shot/stabbed/clubbed it absolutely still hurts, but there is an important way in which these attacks "don't really do anything". On the emotional side, the aim is not that you never feel a twinge of hurt/sorrow/jealo... (read more)

Quick description of a pattern I have that can muddle communication.

"So I've been mulling over this idea, and my original thoughts have changed a lot after I read the article, but not because of what the article was trying to persuade me of ..."

Genera Pattern: There is a concrete thing I want to talk about (a new idea - ???). I don't tell what it is, I merely provide a placeholder reference for it ("this idea"). Before I explain it, I begin applying a bunch of modifiers (typically by giving a lot of context "This idea is ... (read more)

To everyone on the LW team, I'm so glad we do the year in review stuff! Looking over the table of contents for the 2018 book I'm like "damn, a whole list of bangers", and even looking at top karma for 2019 has a similar effect. Thanks for doing something that brings attention to previous good work.

[Everything is "free" and we inundate you in advertisements] feels bad. First thought alternative is something like paid subscriptions, or micropayments per thing consumed. But the question is begged, how does anyone find out about the sites they want to subscribe to? If only there was some website aggregator that was free for me to use so that I could browse different possible subscriptions...

Oh no. Or if not oh no, it seems like the selling eyeballs model won't go away just because alternatives exist, if only from the "people need to ... (read more)

I've been writing on twitter more lately. Sometimes when I'm trying to express and idea, to generate progress I'll think "What's the shortest sentence I can write that convinces me I know what I'm talking about?" This is different from "What's a simple but no simpler explanation for the reader?"

Starting a twitter thread and forcing several tweet sized chunk of ideas out are quite helpful for that. It helps get the concept clearer in my head, and then I have something out there and I can dwell on how I'd turn it into a consumable for others.

From Gwern's about page:

I personally believe that one should think Less Wrong and act Long Now, if you follow me.

Possibly my favorite catch-phrase ever :) What do I think is hiding there?

• Think Less Wrong
• Self anthropology- "Why do you believe what you believe?"
• Hugging the Query and not sinking into confused questions
• Litany of Tarski
• Notice your confusion - "Either the story is false or you model is wrong"
• Act Long Now
• Cultivate habits and practice routines that seem small / trivial on a day/week/month timeline, but will result in you

Stub Post: Thoughts on why it can be hard to tell if something is hindsight bias or not.

Imagine one's thought process as an idea-graph, with the process of thinking being hopping around nodes. Your long term memory can be thought of as the nodes and edges that are already there and persist strongly. The contents of your working memory are like temporary nodes and edges that are in your idea graph, and everything that is close to them gets a +10 to speed-of-access. A short term memory node can even cause edges to pop up between two other nodes around i... (read more)

Utility functions aren't composable! Utility functions aren't composable! Sorry to shout, I've just realized a very specific way I've been wrong for quite some time.

VNM utility is completely ignores that structure and of outcomes and "similarities" between outcomes. U(1 apple) doesn't need to have any relation to U(2 apples). With decision scenarios I'm used to interacting in, there are often ways in which it is natural to things of outcomes as compositions or transformation of other outcomes or objects. When I thin... (read more)

The way I see "Politics is the Mind Killer" get used, it feels like the natural extension is "Trying to do anything that involves high stakes or involves interacting with the outside world or even just coordinating a lot of our own Is The Mind Killer".

From this angle, a commitment to prevent things from getting "too political" to "avoid everyone becoming angry idiots" is also a commitment to not having an impact.

I really like how jessica re-frames things in this comment. The whole comment is interesting, here's a snippet:

Basically, if the issue is adversar

So a thing Galois theory does is explain:

Why is there no formula for the roots of a fifth (or higher) degree polynomial equation in terms of the coefficients of the polynomial, using only the usual algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and application of radicals (square roots, cube roots, etc)?

Which makes me wonder; would there be a formula if you used more machinery that normal stuff and radicals? What does "more than radicals" look like?

There are two times when Occam's razor comes to mind. One is for addressing "crazy" ideas ala "The witch down the road did it" and one is for picking which legit seeming hypothesis might I prioritize in some scientific context.

For the first one, I really like Eliezer's reminder that when going with "The witch did it" you have to include the observed data in your explanation.

For the second one, I've been thinking about the simplicity formulation that one of my professors uses. Roughly, A is simpler than B if all ... (read more)

"Contradictions aren't bad because they make you explode and conclude everything, they're bad because they don't tell you what to do next."

Quote from a professor of mine who makes formalisms for philosophy of science stuff.

Looking at my calendar over the last 8 months, it looks like my attention span for a project is about 1-1.5 weeks. I'm musing on what it would like to lean into that. Have multiple projects at once? Work extra hard to ensure I hit save points before the weekends? Only work on things in week long bursts?

Elephant in the Brain style model of signaling:

Actually showing that you have XYZ skill/trait is the most beneficial thing you can do, because others can verify you've got the goods and will hire your / like you / be on your team. So now there's an incentive for everyone to be constantly displaying there skills/traits. This takes up a lot of time and energy, and I'm gonna guess that anti-competition norms created "showing off" as a bad thing to do to prevent this "over saturation".

So if there's an "no showing-of... (read more)

(tid bit from some recent deep self examination I've been doing)

I incurred judgment-fueled "motivational debt" by aggressively buying into the idea "Talk is worthless, the only thing that matters is going out and getting results" at a time where I was so confident I never expected to fail. It felt like I was getting free motivation, because I saw no consequences to making this value judgment about "not getting results".

When I learned more, the possibility of failure became more real, and that cannon of judgement I'd built swiveled around to point at me. Oops.

I love attention, but I HATE asking for it. I've noticed this a few times before in various forms. This time it really clicked. What changed?

• This time around, the insight came in the context of performing magic. This made the "I love attention" part more obvious than other times, when I merely noticed, "I have an allergic reaction to seeming needy."
• I was able to remember some of the context that this pattern arose from, and can observe "Yes, this may have helped me back then, but here are ways it isn't as helpful now, and it's not automatically terrible

One of the more useful rat-techniques I've enjoyed has been the reframing of "Making a decision right here right now" to "Making this sort of decision in these sorts of scenarios". When considering how to judge a belief based on some arguments, the question becomes, "Am I willing to accept this sort of conclusion based on this sort of argument in similar scenarios?"

From that, if you accept claim-argument pair A "Dude, if electric forks where a good idea, someone would have done it by now", but not claim-argument... (read more)

There are a few instances where I've had "re-have an idea" 3 times, each in a slightly different form, before it stuck and affected me in any significant way. I noticed this when going through some old notebooks and seeing stub-thoughts of ideas that I was currently flushing out (and had been unaware that I had given this thing thought before). One example is with TAPS. Two winters ago I was writing about an idea I called "micro habits/attitudes" and they felt super important, but nothing ever came of them. Now I see that basically... (read more)

So Kolmogorov Complexity depends on the language, but the difference between complexity in any two languages differs by at most a constant (what ever the size of an interpreter from one to the other is).

This seems to mean that the complexity ordering of different hypothesis can be rearranged by switching languages, but "only so much". So

$K_1\left(h_0\right)<K_1\left(h_1\right)<K_1\left(h_2\right)<K_1\left(h_3\right)$