All of crybx's Comments + Replies

Somewhere, recently, I saw someone comment almost in passing that grad school shouldn't cost anything. I can't find the source now. Maybe someone can clarify if that's a serious claim? I've been under the impression for a while that grad school and academia would be an awfully expensive way to acquire the prerequisite knowledge for AI safety work.

please assign the issue to yourself in github so people know someone is working on it.

It doesn't look like users can assign issues to themselves without being invited to be a contributor.

Link.

Now that I have a copy of the code running on my local machine, I was thinking of grabbing an issue to work on. (I can't promise any commitment level beyond one issue yet.) I'm trying to be thorough reading what docs there are, and I've come across the contributing guidelines which says to check out a roadmap (a Trello board) and join a Slack channel before working on anything. The Trello board doesn't make much sense to me and I'm not sure if either of these instructions are still important to follow, or if I really should just claim an unassigned issue with a 'good first issue' or 'help wanted' tag.

Adding the missing line fixed it! I have Lesswrong2 running successfully on Windows at http://localhost:3000/ now.

This might be a good use case for someone to create a Docker image (or some other container) that has a development environment that just works for new users.

If you try again, I think you can avoid needing bash. See my comment here.

I got further than gjm reported.

I needed to:

• Install Node (That link goes to the exact version listed in .nvmrc)
• Install Python 2.7.whatever since I only had Python 3 before this.
• Install Visual C++ 2015 Tools for Windows Desktop - This was the weirdest one, but after this, npm install works without error.
• Install meteor

I learned that npm start is unnecessary. It runs a bash script that

1. checks meteor is installed

2. creates the file settings.json if it doesn't exist by copying from sample_settings.json

3. runs command meteor --settings settings.json

If... (read more)

Your comment was definitely worthwhile for me. Thanks to your very strong recommendation (and the fact that it doesn't look like it'll take much time), I'm going to check out the fast.ai course very soon. I'll be referencing back to this comment to check out your other recommendations in the future too. Thank you.

I use Windows and intend to try to get this running on my machine.

Also, fyi, the first link to the GitHub repo in the tl;dr doesn't point to the right place.

It's always a bit amazing to me how much I don't have to remember to be able to work on big software projects. It's like as long as I know what's possible, and when it's applicable, it takes only moments to search for and zero in on specific implementation details.

And yet in this situation, some anxious voice in my head cries, "But do you really know what you're doing if you can't remember every detail?!"

So thank you for reassurance on that. Also, thank you for the recommendations!

I'd call delicious food a lotus for me. Sometimes it feels so easy for me to fall into addictions that I could get addicted to cereal.

Palatable food may indeed highjack things in our brains leading to negative consequences.

I've also personally found that always eating delicious foods will make me subconsciously start looking for food in moments of boredom.

I do think it's important to experience pleasures in life, and delicious food is a great treat, but like too many things in our lives, our food supply is being engineered to superstimulus l... (read more)

Intuitively seeing things as being like the pie graph is why the birds example for scope insensitivity doesn't feel like a case where I should try to do anything differently. Maybe I only have an ~$80 budget to care about birds because I can't smash a bigger slice into my pie of caring.

This might read like confident advice, but it's mostly just the strategy I've been using because it seems sensible to me.

For any of these topics with dedicated books (especially ones recommended as high quality), there will be proofs presented along the way while reading them. Don't just read the proofs. Try pausing before you read/understand the proof and try to work out how you would prove it yourself. Then read (and maybe re-read) until you think you get it, and try to prove it again without looking back at the material.

Keeping a list of ... (read more)

I think that satisficing is sometimes the right way to approach tasks. I would classify a whole slew of tasks as not super important but still needing to be done. It isn't always worth it to pour energy into everything you do. As someone who errs on the side of perfectionism too often, I find the concept of succeeding with no wasted motion to be a sanity saver.

I feel similarly to what you expressed in your first paragraph, and somewhat similar to your third. When I realize certain people can't stand being alone, I imagine them as someone who has no idea what to do with themselves. I feel like my brain is highjacked if I'm not given enough alone time to process my thoughts, and that parts of me are never fully expressed until I am alone.

Maybe this means I need to improve my social circle?

Your observation of the Buddhist "no self" claims seems to me like a misunderstanding due to different defi... (read more)

After reading your Mythic Mode post, and before seeing this comment, I was trying to think of a possible mythic mode name for this other than Omega. Hermaeus Mora, a Lovecraftian-like being from the Elder Scrolls video game series, overpowers any other ideas in my head:

Hermaeus Mora, also known as Hoermius, Hormaius, Hermorah, Herma Mora, and The Woodland Man is the Daedric Prince of knowledge and memory; his sphere is the scrying of the tides of Fate, of the past and future as read in the stars and heavens. He is not known for being good or evil; he seems

This sentiment seems opposed to what others have expressed. Mixed messaging is part of why I've been confused.

Aspiring rationalists could benefit from a central place to make friends with and interact with other rationalists (that isn't Facebook) and welcoming 2) seems like it would be a way to incentivize community, while hopefully the Archipelago model limits how much this could lower LW's main posts' standards.

I notice that when I write about rationality adjacent things, it most often comes out as a story about my personal experience... (read more)

I'm confused about what sort of content belongs on LW 2.0, even in the Archipelago model.

I've been a lurker on LW and many of the diaspora rational blogs for years, and I've only recently started commenting after being nudged to do so by certain life events, certain blog posts, and the hopeful breath of life slightly reanimating LessWrong.

Sometimes I write on a personal blog elsewhere, but my standards are below what I'd want to see on LW. Then again, I've seen things on LW that are below my standards of what I expect on LW.

I'... (read more)

I'm a software engineer and my degree in college required a good chunk of advanced math. I am currently in the process of trying to relearn the math I've forgotten, plus some, so I'm thinking that if this analysis/algebra dichotomy points at a real preference difference, knowing which I am might help me choose more effective learning sources.

But I find it hard to point to one category or another for most aspects. Even the corn test is inconclusive! (I agree that it sounds more like an analysis thing to do.)

• I love the step-by-step bits of alg

Eating corn on the cob is messy and gets stuff stuck in my teeth. It’s also slow. I always find a knife (even just a plastic butter knife), cut the corn off, and eat it with a fork or spoon. What category does that fit in? Until I started doing this, I think I kept experimenting with eating in different patterns. I have no idea what it’s like to eat corn without trying to optimize the process.

I would be wary of thinking of social roles as a market. There's something about social interactions that isn't market related, and bringing up prices seems to be able to make people's relationships less fulfilling. At least according to Dan Ariely in the book Predictably Irrational.

"...once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return."

Quick Googling of market vs social norms (or some variation on that) brought up tons of links, but this one does an okay job of summarizing what the book said about it:

https://n... (read more)

I know all models are wrong, and some are useful. But in every day life, I find myself thinking of my brain in two parts that are roughly A) my beam of attention and B) my everything else. This doesn't seem to be totally captured by the other divisions and metaphors mentioned. Both A and B feel like *me*.

My attention (A) feels a lot like a beam of light that can be narrow, wide, dim, or even off. My everything else seems to include my subconscious, the answers that pop into my head without effort, the habits I execute by rote, internal dialogue that c... (read more)

This post impressed me, I think, because it didn't start out saying there was a prototype. I may have stopped reading at "prototype" if that line came first. There's a huge "blech" factor for me at the idea of giving feedback on yet another partially created bit of software.

Reading the ideas about what the tool would (hopefully) do had me thinking, "this sounds cool, but is anyone ever going to actually make it?"

Then, near the end, the prototype is revealed. I thought, "Wow. Huh. I'm impressed they didn't just talk about an idea that never goes anywhere. They executed. And the prototype seems neat when I play with it."

As 2018 began, I started thinking about what I should do if I personally take AI seriously. So your post is timely for me. I've spent the last couple weeks figuring out how to catch up on the current state of AI development.

What I should do next is still pretty muddy. Or scary.

I have a computer engineering degree and have been a working software developer for several years. I do consider myself a "technical person," but I haven't focused on AI before now. I think I could potentially contribute to AI safety research. If I spend some tim... (read more)

I think you're describing a very useful mindset here. I've used it myself, rather explicitly, by saying things like, "Okay. So what do we do now?" But something about the wording of, "Here we are" or "Hwa", even in your example uses, strikes me as appearing dismissive. I can't pinpoint exactly why. It reads/sounds like a shrug. I don't think I would ever use this phrasing with anyone who didn't already know of it, because I wouldn't want to give the impression that I'm dismissing the other person's emotions.

I would not personally use the phrases "it is/things are/whatever is okay." But one way reacting like "it's not okay" could look is the instinct to make reality retrospectively not be how it is. Denial. We can affect the future, but there's no use denying what already is.

If the first thing you do is interpret that new info would make the world a bad place (moralizing reality), you may flinch into rationalizing ways it can't be so before you even notice what you did.

I don't claim that I gained this skill of ‘Looking’ ... (read more)

I'm late to this comment thread. I had to read a lot of the comments (more than once) before it clicked in a way that I'm fairly sure *I recognize what Looking is* and that I already have the skill and use it more than I think is common (but not always or consistently).

"I can form deep, deep pacts with others who know how to Look. This is harder to explain, but I can point to an analogy clearly, I think: if you're in the cell phone world and you see someone else who has figured out how to look up, there's a kind of deep collaborati... (read more)

What is "counter anxiety"? If your seed never makes it to a post, I'd like to at least have this clue.

I read the book almost 2 years ago. I also remember struggling to pinpoint what language would fit the way I want to experience love. For me, I want mental intimacy. "Being seen" is maybe a way of saying something similar, but I don't know for sure if you mean the same thing.

For me this means:

• Ability to discuss anything. Nothing is off the table.
• Feeling comfortable revealing the things you normally mask for the rest of the world.
• Interest in ideas the other has and their mental processes.
• The desire to actually talk about things.
• No knee j

"Now, I have no idea how scared it's actually appropriate to be about this. In politics, and journalism, we're incentivized to stories that freak us out and exaggerate risks."

I'm struggling with exactly this right now regarding the North Korea stuff. When I'm scared, I can't tell if I'm overreacting. When I'm not scared, I can't tell if I'm underreacting. There are precautions I could be taking to make my own survival more likely in the event of a bombing, but those precautions would be a big waste of ... (read more)

I am curious how everyone would be able to go about trying modafinil. I've been interested in trying it for a long time, but I can't bring myself to attempt a sketchy internet order.