All of Aay17ush's Comments + Replies

Answer by Aay17ush120

I'm surprised fatebook.io isn't an answer here. I had in the past tried a bunch of personal prediction tools and felt dis-satisfied. Either because of the complexity, UI, or something else. Anyways, I've been using fatebook for a couple weeks now and loving it.

More info: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yS3d46m23wRKDQobt/introducing-fatebook-the-fastest-way-to-make-and-track 

3Raemon
Yeah Fatebook is my new go-to. I think it either didn't exist at the time I posted this, or it was still fairly new/untested.

The way you use intelligence is different from how many people here using that word mean it. 
Check this out (for a partial understanding of what they mean): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aiQabnugDhcrFtr9n/the-power-of-intelligence

-3Rafael Harth
The commenter you're responding to mentioned physical and brute force, so I don't think the understanding of intelligence is the crux.

Interesting! I've recently been thinking a bunch about "narratives" (frames) and how strongly they shape how/what we think. Making it much harder to see "the" truth since changing the narrative changes things quite a bit.

I'm curious if anyone has an example of how they would go about applying frame-invariance to rationality.

Aay17ush1212

These kinds of explorations (unusual and truth-seeking) are why I love lesswrong :)

I've found the post "Reward is not the optimization target" quite confusing. This post cleared the concept up for me. Especially the selection framing and example. Thank you!

Finland too (and I expect quite a few other EU countries to do so as well)

Lily: If I was a parent I would change the fifteen minutes to ten minutes. Screen time is kind of bad for kids. I also like having an hour and a half for movies, but I think maybe it's a bit much?

haha that’s so sweet! :D

Answer by Aay17ush210

Tldr: Love used to be in short supply (for self and others). Read Replacing guilt and tried improv + metta meditation. Now it is in big supply and has lead to significant positive changes in my actions.

I have always been in a single-player and critical mindset, optimizing everything for me. Thinking about what would be a nice thing to do for others (and empathizing with their feelings) hardly ever popped into my awareness. 

Over the last year, 

  • Replacing guilt made me realize I didn't need negative thoughts to motivate me. This led me to incrementa
... (read more)

I assume EA student groups have a decent amount of rationalists in them (30%?), so the two categories are not as easily separable. And thus it's not as bad as it sounds for rationalists.

Aay17ushΩ0130

Will you be approachable for incubating less experienced people (for example student interns), or do you not want to take that overhead right now?

5adamShimi
(I will be running the Incubator at Conjecture) The goal for the incubator is to foster new conceptual alignment research bets that could go on to become full-fledged research directions, either at Conjecture or at other places. We’re thus planning to select mostly on the quality we expect for a very promising independent conceptual researcher, that is proactivity (see Paul Graham’s Relentlessly Resourceful post) and some interest or excitement about not fully tapped streams of evidence (see this recent post). Although experience with alignment could help, it might also prove a problem if it comes with too strong ontological commitment and limits exploration of unusual research directions and ideas. The start of the program will include a lot of discussion and sharing a map of alignment and mental moves that I (Adam) have been building over the last few months, so this should bring people up to speed to do productive research. If you have any more questions about this, feel free to reach me either on LW or at my Conjecture email.

What is the reasoning behind non-disclosure by default? It seems opposite to what EleutherAI does.

See a longer answer here.

TL;DR: For the record, EleutherAI never actually had a policy of always releasing everything to begin with and has always tried to consider each publication’s pros vs cons. But this is still a bit of change from EleutherAI, mostly because we think it’s good to be more intentional about what should or should not be published, even if one does end up publishing many things. EleutherAI is unaffected and will continue working open source. Conjecture will not be publishing ML models by default, but may do so on a case by case ... (read more)

This is lovely! I’ve a couple questions (will post them in the AMA as well if this is not a good place to ask)

  1. What is the reasoning behind non-disclosure by default? It seems opposite to what EleutherAI does.

  2. Will you be approachable for incubating less experienced people (for example student interns), or do you not want to take that overhead right now?

1Connor Leahy
Answered here and here.

Metta (loving-kindness) meditation would be an example practice that tries to focus attention on actively loving others in order to get better at it over time. 

I don't have time to currently point out to concrete research backing it up, but it's been often discussed positively on Lesswrong and the EA Forum and I have had surprisingly good results from it. In my experience though, it has quite a quick feedback loop so trying it out might be the most efficient way of testing it. The Waking up app by Sam Harris is a good starting point.

This is a great idea! I'm gonna try it out. It fixes quite a lot of things with existing systems, as you point out.

I'm curious though, since when have you been experimenting with it and how has it been? I'm assuming it went well, but I am interested to know more about the details in your process (setbacks, changes, etc) and expect it'll be helpful for others experimenting with this as well :)

4bfinn
Only about three months. So I can't say it's fully tried and tested, though I'm confident the basics are right. It just popped into my head one day. For years - well before I'd heard of Pomodoro - I had my own system of alarms at fixed times of day, alternating 50m (or, later, an hour) of work with 10m or 20m of breaks (based on the DeskTime figures). But it never worked well for the usual clock-work reasons, and so I never stuck to it for more than a few days at a time. The main change when trying Third Time was that early on I had a way of extending meal breaks by a fixed amount - e.g. adding an extra half-hour for lunch - but it was too complicated. An unlimited meal break, but where you have to pre-decide the length, is more practical. No doubt others will come up with improvements, or situations I haven't encountered. Please post your feedback when you've tried it!

I've often thought about this, and this is the conclusion I've reached.

There would need to be some criteria that separates morality from immorality. Given that, consciousness (ie self-modelling) seems like the best criteria given our current knowledge. Obviously, there are gaps (like the comatose patient you mention), but we currently do not have a better metric to latch on to.

0TAG
Why wouldn't the ability to suffer be the criterion? Isn't that built into the concept if sentience? "Sentient" literally means "having senses" but is often used as a synonym for "moral patient".

I put my laptop on a box on top of my desk and use an external keyboard and mouse to operate it.

Love this initiative! I do have a question though. It seems that people with 100+ karma have most likely figured out how to write publicly with a decent quality. So this service would simply be a bonus for them.

Isn't it more important to enable this service for lurkers/readers on Lesswrong who haven't yet written many posts due to the reasons you've mentioned?

Disclaimer: I don't have 100+ karma and haven't written a lot outside as well - just privately in my note taking app.

gwillen250

I have over 2000 karma ~all from comments, and fear of not meeting the quality bar has definitely contributed to my lack of posts. (Two in ten years, and one of them was meta about the site itself.) So I am hoping I will find it in me to try using this and see how it goes!

Ruby150

To answer people's questions about the 100+ karma limit:

As lsusr notes, 100 karma isn't that much and can easily be obtained be obtained by commenting. I think that's a very reasonable bar to ask of people before offering this service. While I do think we can build the capacity to handle a lot of requests, I expect that without the karma bar, we'd get a lot of requests from people who hadn't yet invested much in the site (or in their draft), simply because those are the most numerous. At least to begin with, I want to reserve the service for more dedicated... (read more)

Anecdata: I haven't figured out writing with decent quality or audience awareness and have been burnt multiple times. I get a cold sweat each time. It just doesn't keep me from posting. But I can totally relate to it, love the solution, and will definitely use it.

Editing can improve quality, or it can keep quality constant while reducing writing time, which is also pretty valuable.

3cousin_it
Yeah, I was also wondering about the minimum requirement. It seems feedback would be most useful to people writing their first posts, and there's no limitation on making a first post, is there? In the AI Alignment Prize I tried to write feedback to everyone and it ended up being a very valuable experience, both for the participants and for me.
lsusr300

It's easy to get >100 karma from comments alone, without any top-level posts.

5Chris_Leong
Maybe they are trying to focus on improving the writing of people who are most likely to continue contributing to the forum in the future?

No I don't think it's a good assumption that most people past a 100 karma have figured out how to write publicly with decent quality (though, depends on what you consider decent).

I'm well past a 100 and I expect this to be very useful to me when I write posts.

And if we're talking in general then even the best writers usually have proofreaders/beta-readers (take Paul graham for example, every essay he releases credits at least a few beta readers)

I do agree it might be especially important to new people that don't have karma, though. It'll be interesting to ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! While reading the post, I was also thinking that this heuristic of building better systems is useful for deciding what to work on in our career as well.

Disclosure: I am new to AI Alignment, and have picked this as my first reading to dive in to.

However, most possibilities for such crucial features, including this one, could be recreated in artificial training environments and in artificial neural networks.

I don't understand how you arrive at this conclusion. Is there some paper/reasoning you could point me to that backs this? Would be helpful.

Also, is this anologous to saying "We can simulate environments that can give rise to features such as general intelligence? " (Making sure I'm not misinterpreting)

My biggest reasoning for not babbling is imposter syndrome. So there's no better exercise than this to start babbling :)

  1. Read a book on imposter syndrome.
  2. Meditate
  3. Talk to someone
  4. Cut yourself some slack
  5. Read about babble!
  6. Ignore it and publish the result anyway
  7. Look at your past achievements
  8. Do a poll on twitter asking how many people get imposter syndrome
  9. Sleep
  10. Go do something you know you're amazing at
  11. Write about your feelings - writing therapy
  12. Enjoy it until you have it.
  13. Get a coloring book and color inside the lines. That's hard!
  14. Cook something delicious
  15. Listen to
... (read more)

I've been thinking about this too, and I agree with your conclusion. The way I think about boredom is that since we (or the environment) block off external stimulation, our mind is forced to internally stimulate us (assuming that we have a constant need for stimulation).

Initially, as you mentioned, this leads to remembering small tasks and worries that have been on our mind. But after exhausting that reserve, it has no option except to stimulate us with things we haven't been thinking about consciously, i.e - creative thoughts.

I've been failing to implemen... (read more)

2Mathisco
Woah, thanks for your confirmation. I'll admit it's a constant struggle. This smartphone is both a blessing and a curse. Did you ever follow those guided meditation apps? It's all about recognizing you are distracted and moving back to your breath or some other concentration excercise. Well, I try to catch myself in the act of avoiding boredom. Reaching to my phone. Or opening some social media app. Or even going to read LessWrong. Those are cues. Instead I now stare out the window a bit, accepting the boredom, doing a micro-meditation. Or I start writing a small note about some topic. I tried a Babble just now. But afterwards I looked up that babble link, got distracted by the LessWrong notifications and here we are, replying to your comment. Ok, I am going to go back now. But I'll think about this a bit as well.