According to Wikipedia, the rough timeline is that there were several standards in use by military and civil aviation in the 1940s and earlier, including separate standards for Latin America and elsewhere, and these used Zebra in the US and UK. The International Air Transport Association presented a draft in1947 to the standards body International Civil Aviation Organization that was meant to rectify this, but it still contained Zebra. Apparently this alphabet wasn't good enough, because the ICAO hired a linguistics professor to create a revised alphabet, ...
I do find this one generally better, since I think the overall discussion is not that novel and so doesn't need such long explanation. That said, it did lose a key justification from the other post, that Twitter's size makes it akin to the public square, which is why this kind of rule is necessary to contemplate.
I thought it would be about resigning from the responsibilities of your job that you dislike to work fewer hours on only the parts that interest you more.
I wonder whether there would be much pressure for an LLM with the current architecture to represent "truth" vs. "consistent with the worldview of the best generally accurate authors." If ground-level truth doesn't provide additional accuracy in predicting next tokens, I think it would be possible that we identify a feature that can be used to discriminate what "generally accurate authors" would say about a heretofore unknown question or phenomenon, but not one that can be used to identify inaccurate sacred cows.
I downvoted this post because I think this genre of "essay written by GPT" has quickly become tiresome. If someone wants to use GPT as a sort of code completion for essay writing, and thus stands behind all the points, edits it for coherency and to ensure that there are deeper thoughts being explained, it's no big deal. But just reading unedited GPT essays doesn't feel like a great use of anyone's time now that the novelty has worn off.
For language flashcards, you can have the front card be something like "Biblioteca" and the back card "Library [generated picture of a library]." This helps recall even though it's not part of the prompt-- it just seems to stick better in your memory.
The reason that the villagers didn't trust the boy that he didn't have a track record. One reason we don't trust people who are loudly proclaiming certain kinds of doom is that they don't have a track record of accurately predicting things (e.g. Heaven's Gate), and that's an inherently important aspect of the phenomenon this post is describing. If the child had accurately predicted wolves in the past, real world villagers would have paid attention to a 15% warning.
The post is suggesting that certain kinds of risks have low probability, and the predictors d...
It's very cool, especially as a side project. If I'd known it was created by someone here I would have been more careful about the tone of my comment.
I tried WriteHolo against an idea I had for a blog post and its recommendations were worse than useless. I think for non-fiction writing it's probably a non-starter. It couldn't even give me a concise summary of something readily available on Wikipedia (e.g. the availability heuristic), much less suggest creative connections that are at all coherent.
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can't even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn't lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
Being seen as impeding work and being in the way of money making is the quickest way out of the position where you can affect decision making. Erecting prohibitions would do that.
Disagree. A lot of times management would put someone in the position of writing policy as a matter of pure delegation, in which case they'd want a sensible policy that constrains the business in line with that business' unique risks. Writing too lax of a policy is worse than writing one that has some restrictions that make sense in the context of what they are actually buildin...
I didn't notice the author, nor the tags. My thought when the article asked for a prediction was that they grew up in a Jainist community of some kind, although I realized that Jainists may not have their own television shows, and the probability of someone from LessWrong having grown up in a Jainist community is probably less likely than that they grew up in a cult of some kind. But cults are even less likely to have their own television shows, I surmised, at which point I decided the point about television shows was probably rhetorical. That's when I decided the entire thing might be rhetorical, so it wasn't actually worth making a prediction.
I learned a similar trick from an old LW post. You focus on the static in your visual field. If it starts to resolve into random seeming images, that is the beginning of hypnogagia, and if it starts to resolve into even more concrete imagery you are very close to sleep. Try to keep focusing on it, eventually you will fall asleep. This generally works for me.
P.S.: sometimes children do parrot their parents to an alarming degree, e.g., about political positions they couldn't possibly have the context to truly understand.
It's much better for children to parrot the political positions of their parents than to select randomly from the total space of political opinions. The vast majority of possible-political-opinion-space is unaligned.
They could also easily just desire different things ("have different utility functions"). This is the basis for gains from trade, and, more germane to this example, political parties.
If Effective Evil thinks the most efficient way to do evil is assaulting people's eyeballs with dust specks, and I think the most effective way to do evil would be increasing torture, I can use the money they give me to engineer aeroplane dust distribution technology to reduce torture. If they think 1000 specks equals 1 minute of torture, but I think 10e9 specks equals 1 minut...
It's hard not to fight the hypothetical because these movements are determined by how committed the protesters are. If we assume infinite commitment of 100% of 12-17 year olds I think this would be very likely to succeed. If we assume realistic levels of commitment this would never happen. So it's very sensitive as a hypothetical to your assumptions.
Seems you are at least missing one if you think telling someone Bill dies at the end of a movie called “Kill Bill” is your last category.
To get overly analytical, you know it’s a possibility Bill dies. In Sixth Sense you may not even consider the possibility what’s-his-name is dead.
I think what you've described is most closely related to the Overton window. Often it is discussed in more neutral terms on LessWrong, meaning without the certitude of personal opinions from this post.
Searching for Overton window on LessWrong will turn up more references. If you find this concept interesting, you may also enjoy the Politics is the Mind-killer sequence, which is all about changing your mind on political issues, if you haven't read that.
Only tangentially related, but I found this recent comment thread on Hacker News very interesting. There are carbon scrubbers you can buy and attach to computer fans to completely eliminate odors without using air fresheners, much less incense or candles.
I've read this book and many other calisthenics and weightlifting focused fitness books. I like Convict Conditioning. It was pretty influential in the online fitness community when it came out, and remains so to some extent. That said, the information and programs in the book are somewhat out-of-date compared to more modern thinking.
I would recommend anyone interested in calisthenics to start with the reddit /r/bodyweightfitness FAQ. They have easy defaults (e.g. the Recommended Routine, or the Primer) which come with more battle-tested explanations and pr...
I watched a few of the DHH, Eric Normand and Be a Better Dev videos. DHH's videos are very good, actually I was sucked into watching a couple, but he doesn't have very many. Also, your link points to his old channel, and now all those videos are https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9wALaIpe0Py6E_oHCgTrD6FvFETwJLlx, although he only did one more in that series. The couple Eric Normand videos were pretty good, I could imagine that there are really good ones somewhere in the feed. For Be a Better Dev, the videos seemed pretty low quality, very focused on l...
In the early stages of Quora, it was a legitimately awesome place to get unfiltered answers from people you were interested in. Eventually, the bleeding edge people got bored of it and left it to the vultures, the same people who had SEOed bullshit pages cluttering up google search results. I've never used Clubhouse, but this seems like a risk. Is there some structural reason this won't come to pass?
I second this. Most negotiation advice is geared toward formal "negotiation" settings, like when you are negotiating sales contracts or business transactions. For those purposes, having negotiation tools is really useful (my favorite is "Bargaining For Advantage" which I learned of from The Personal MBA). But for being a manager, you are almost never explicitly negotiating, and in fact trying to come into your work with that mindset is counterproductive. When you are working with your reports, it would be disastrous. When you are working with other interna...
I have used Anki to remember names and faces on multiple occasions. It works well, usually I've only used it at the beginning of being in the environment. For the names of famous people I don't think it passes the cost-benefits test. Gwern recommends only adding a card if it will save you 5 minutes over a lifetime, and so memorizing large corpuses where you may only need a handful of them ever is likely to be a bad tradeoff. The difference between these scenarios is that remembering faces and names is something you need to have instant access to, but misre...
My guess is head, painting photograph.
First (Head): Lacks the level of detail of the other two examples. A painting would also possibly be drawn from a reference, although I have no idea what even the style of painting you were referencing. The major distinction here is that the cheeks in the the second (painting) photo have mottling that suggests to me a better reference. The proportions also seem just a bit more exaggerated to me than the other two. The neck of the first one seems larger, and the shoulders have some asymmetry which is hard to interpret. ...
I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon's "six-page memos." The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.
My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to crit...
Why do you think people don't already do this?
They have to do it to some extent, otherwise replicability would be literally uncorrelated with publishability, which probably isn't the case. But because of the outcomes, we can see that people aren't doing it enough at the margin, so encouraging people to move as far in that direction as they can seems like a useful reminder.
There are two models here, one is that everyone is a homo economicus when citing papers, so no amount of persuasion is going to adjust people's citations. They are already making the o...
This problem seems to me to have the flavor of Moloch and/or inadequate equilibria. Your criticisms have two parts, the pre-edit part based on your personal experience, in which you state why the personal actions they recommend are actually not possible because of the inadequate equilibria (i.e. because of academic incentives), and the criticism of the author's proposed non-personal actions, which you say is just based on intuition.
I think the author would be unsurprised that the personal actions are not reasonable. They have already said this problem requ...
The article about this on Strengtheory has links to sources (not as footnotes, in the text). May be useful to check out.
When it comes to problems that are primarily related to motivation, the cost-benefit is so far weighted that the cost of implementing the plan probably doesn't seem relevant to consider, but this is a good point.
I like the idea of using Murphyjitsu for modeling shorter iterations, that's probably generally applicable.
That seems mostly about the emotional content of a particular plan, while I see Murphyjitsu as a tool for avoiding the planning fallacy, forcing yourself to fully think through the implications of a plan, or getting more realistic predictions from System 1. I haven't viewed it much as an emotional tool, but maybe other people do find it useful for that.
Whew, glad I didn't invest more time in this. Seems there is lurking complexity everywhere.
At this price point this seems potentially doable. Some ideas in the order I'd try them:
I admit there might be reasons to invest in meditation practice that are not based on scientifically proven benefits (e.g., curiosity, sense of novelty, sense of belonging to a community). At the same time, I hope that most LW readers attach very little weight to those non-evidence-based reasons to meditate, just like I do.
I suppose I should admit the main reason I started meditating a long time ago was curiosity. I read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (reviewed on SSC here) and thought "well, this person sounds like they are explaining menta
...I think it is right to be skeptical of the science around meditation. Meditation perfectly fits into the Bermuda triangle of phenomenon for which our current scientific institutions and practices are not well-prepared to study.
It shares with psychological studies the challenge that the thing under investigation is the internal mental state of the subject. When there are studies with objective endpoints, usually the objective endpoint isn't the thing we want to get out of it, it's just a more reliable metric so we know the subjects aren't fooling themselves
...As for cutoffs, just look up max healthy forehead temperature, maybe 37.5. More important is to have prominently available hand sanitizer pumps and encourage people to use it before and after the event, and remind them not to touch their faces.
There are several sources of spaghetti code that are possible:
Sorry, I could have been clearer. The empirical evidence I was referring to was the existence of human civilization, which should inform priors about the likelihood of other animals being as intelligent.
I think you are referring to a particular type of "scientific evidence" which is a subset of empirical evidence. It's reasonable to ask for that kind of proof, but sometimes it isn't available. I am reminded of Eliezer's classic post You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof.
To be honest, I think the answer is that there is just no truth
...The database search thing is, according to my understanding, widely misinterpreted. As Wikipedia says:
Although the purpose of Grover's algorithm is usually described as "searching a database", it may be more accurate to describe it as "inverting a function". In fact since the oracle for an unstructured database requires at least linear complexity, the algorithm cannot be used for actual databases.
To actually build Quantum Postgres, you need something that can store an enormous number of qubits, like a hard drive.
Your take is contrarian as I suspect you will admit. There is quite a bit of empirical evidence, and if it turned out that humans were not the most intelligent it would be very surprising. There is probably just enough uncertainty that it's still within the realm of possibility, but only by a small margin.
This sort of existence argument is reasonable for hypothetical supehuman AIs, but real-world human cognition is extremely sensitive to the structure we can find or make up in the world. Sure, just saying "politics" does not provide a clear reference class, so it would be helpful to understand what you want to avoid about politics and engineer around it. My hunch is that avoiding your highly-technical definition of bad discourse that you are using to replace "politics" just leads to a lot of time spent on your politics analysis, with approximately the same
...I was very confused about your proposed setup after reading the wikipedia article on heat exchangers, since I couldn't figure out what thermal masses you proposed exchanging heat between. But I found this article which resolved my confusion.
It is still useful to memorize the flashcards. The terminology provides hooks that will remind you of the conceptual framework later. If you want to practice actually recognizing the design patterns, you could read some of http://aosabook.org/en/index.html and actively try to recognize design patterns. When you want to learn to do something, it's important to practice a task that is as close as possible to what you are trying to learn.
In real life when a software design pattern comes up, it's usually not as something that you determine from the code. More
...Perhaps the community to ask on mostly doesn't depend on the expertise of the denizens, but your ability to get a response. If so, it matters more whether your question is something that will "hook" the people there, which depends more on the specific topic of the question than on the knowledge required to answer it. For example, if it were about the physics of AI, you'd be likely to get an answer on LessWrong. If it's about academic physics, reddit might be better. If you are using it to write fanfiction, just ask on a fanfiction forum.
It matters quite a
...Yes, that seems like a reasonable perspective. I can see why that would be annoying.
I really appreciate that this post was on the front page, because I wouldn't have seen it otherwise and it was interesting. From an external viewer perspective on the "status games" aspect of it, I think the front page post didn't seem like a dominance attempt, but read as an attempt at truth seeking. I also don't think that it put your arguments in a negative light. Your comments here, on the other hand, definitely feel to an outside observer to be more status-oriented. My visceral reaction upon reading your comment above this one, for example, was that y
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I suppose you could consider the 80,000 hours job board if not adjacent, at least adjacent-adjacent.