LESSWRONG
LW

All of charlesoblack's Comments + Replies

Deception Chess
charlesoblack31

This seems like a fun idea. I imagine there would be some high-level streamers willing to try this live (maybe chessbrah?).

What kind of lessons do you envision we learn from Deception Chess that could be applied towards alignment work? In my head, the situation is slightly different since we (or I) are currently assuming an AI tool isn't actively trying to deceive us, but in Deception Chess it's already known that there's a malicious actor.

Reply
2Chris Land
It's a playground for testing ideas associated with Deception. Naturally there are other ways and other arenas. The rules for this arena are fun and flexible (perhaps no deceivers some of the time!), but still limited to discussing only the quality of particular chess moves in a specific positions. Quality as compared to a hidden but soon-revealed 'perfect' answer. As far as lessons, I expect Player will have the most valuable post-game perspective. How easy is it to judge quality of Advice? In what ways does advice look different if it's Deceptive? Does it even look different? Given a reasonably strong Opponent, most any human advice appears 'Deceptive' with no such intent.
Petrov Day 2021: Mutually Assured Destruction?
charlesoblack30

I feel like that's part of the point. I'm not going to lie - the thought definitely crossed my mind to press the button and see if anything would happen even without launch codes. There's a sort of... allure about it. But knowing that potentially just pressing the button, could bring down the EA forum? that was enough to discourage me from trying it out.

Our stakes are much much smaller, of course, but I still feel some weight of the responsibility.

Reply
2Yoav Ravid
Yes, it's definitely part of the point. That's why I expected they would track it.
The Best Software For Every Need
charlesoblack10

Yes, I used to be a daily guy. Over a graduate degree it got much more difficult to keep that up so I did have a backlog coming out of that, but I'm caught up.

I do think partly it's my settings that I haven't touched much, but that doesn't really help me right now of course, just me in a few years. It also mostly just pushes the problem further into the future.

Some advice I've seen thrown around is that at some point, one should just retire cards and rely on seeing the information naturally in the real world and not in SRS; that sounds like a risky thing t... (read more)

Reply
1Ansel
It's possible you're in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I'm also in the camp of only using the "again" and "good" buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you've been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
The Best Software For Every Need
charlesoblack10

Sure. Caveat: I haven't actually done any cards the past 8 days (finding it hard to motivate myself...) so this is likely low on young cards, but accurate on mature cards.

First image is desktop Anki, second is AnkiDroid simulations (which in my experience have proven pretty close to the truth). https://imgur.com/a/Swb6UjH

The second graph has a large spike in the first week because of the past 8 days. I'm also not sure what new cards AnkiDroid is seeing since I don't have any new cards being added.

The number of reviews drops in about 5 months, but even a ye... (read more)

Reply
5TurnTrout
This is really weird. Have you done cards regularly since adding them a few years ago? Or did you catch up from a backlog recently?  I had a deck with 10-13k cards and I was able to get down to like 40 cards/day after a year or two.
The Best Software For Every Need
charlesoblack70

I have to be honest, your tone is coming off a little condescending. I am sure you don't mean it that way, but please make it explicit.

These aren't new cards that I'm studying. Like I said, I've been using Anki for 4 years now; I have learned almost 20k cards, and have about 465k reviews. I have done my due diligence and read the 20 SRS rules several times. Perhaps I'm just not being clear.

My current problem is that, out of ~250 cards I do each day, ~200 of them are mature, and that number doesn't seem to be going down. Right now, I have about 18.8k mature... (read more)

Reply
4TurnTrout
Can you show us what your future card distribution looks like (# of cards vs days in the future)?
The Best Software For Every Need
charlesoblack20

I don't quite think this is it. What I am learning is language (specifically, vocabulary) so there isn't a lot to understand before putting a card into SRS, and the card can't be much clearer than "biblioteca -> library".

 

What I mean about ever-increasing workloads is that at some point, even without adding new cards, you have long-tail cards that you have to review and give you a pretty consistent workload for a long time (because they're long tail cards and have long intervals and are spread out). Right now, without adding any new cards, I do ~250 cards/day; this is barely less than what I was doing when I was learning new material 2 years ago (~300 cards/day).

Reply
-3ChristianKl
Generally, if you follow the SuperMemo recommendations you first learn that library is the word for biblioteca and only after you have learned that you create a card and put it into SRS to avoid forgetting the card. You don't just put that card into a SRS without having learned the word first. Most of the time in SRS is spent because you forget cards. If you build a good foundation by learning before memorizing you reduce that time.
The Best Software For Every Need
charlesoblack50

On the broader topic of SRS, how do you deal with ever-increasing workloads? I'm a user for 4 years now and have been struggling with my current workload, unable to add any more cards.

Reply
-4ChristianKl
To me this suggests that your cards aren't well formed or you try to memorize before understanding. Spend more effort on learning a fact before you put it into the SRS and work on making the cards clearer.
Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition
charlesoblack50

Here is what I did (n=524):

  • calculated performance rating for bullet games for each day
  • calculated anki accuracy (as measured by (1 - again%)) for each day
  • adjusted performance rating according to time by fitting an OLS model to predict perf rating with days since beginning of the dataset, then subtracting the model's prediction (should yield a normal distribution - this model had an R^2 of 0.4)
  • fit an OLS model to predict anki accuracy given the adjusted performance rating

This has an R^2 of 0.016, and the coefficient is ~5.5e-05 (though it is pretty significa... (read more)

Reply
Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition
charlesoblack40

I have a pretty big n dataset for Anki flashcards (and associated performance) and chess games performance that I could try measuring whether there's a predictive effect for long-term memory.

Reply
5charlesoblack
Here is what I did (n=524): * calculated performance rating for bullet games for each day * calculated anki accuracy (as measured by (1 - again%)) for each day * adjusted performance rating according to time by fitting an OLS model to predict perf rating with days since beginning of the dataset, then subtracting the model's prediction (should yield a normal distribution - this model had an R^2 of 0.4) * fit an OLS model to predict anki accuracy given the adjusted performance rating This has an R^2 of 0.016, and the coefficient is ~5.5e-05 (though it is pretty significant). So a performance rating of 1000 higher than predicted only yields a boost of ~5% additional accuracy on anki. Since the adjusted performance rating has a standard deviation of 208 points, that means if you're having a "top cognition" day that's 2 std's above average, that's only 2% higher anki accuracy. Not a lot. Of note: using a "locally smoothed" performance rating (where I smoothed the perf rating, then subtracted that from the perf rating to get a residual) yielded no significant correlation between anki accuracy and perf rating. Arguably this is a stronger bit of evidence - the above (naïvely) assumes that the perf rating goes up linearly with time, but this version is able to deal with plateaus and different slopes in increasing/decreasing rating. I'm open for code/analysis review if anyone wants to double check my work.
Covid 12/17: The First Dose
charlesoblack30

In what world is giving the second dose to the same person, raising them from 87% to 96% protected, a higher priority than vaccinating a second person? 

 

I'm not sure I agree with this point. There's no hard evidence that the second dose is not necessary: nobody was only vaccinated once in the trials (as far as I'm aware). Of course, we do have a prior for the immunity continuing, but we also have examples of other vaccines that require booster shots (HPV, meningitis, hep A/B); so I'd say that we should absolutely explore the one-dose option, but ... (read more)

Reply
Covid 9/17: It’s Worse
charlesoblack30

FWIW, I think the graphs could be a little easier to read if you used the same colors consistently. The positive test percentages graph has one fewer element in it, and the color order is different from the other graphs (blue is West vs Northeast).

Reply