All of CstineSublime's Comments + Replies

Not being an AI researcher, what do we mean when we speak about AGI - will an AGI be able to do all the things a competent adult does? (If, we imagine, we gave it some robotic limbs and means of locomotion and it had corollaries of the 5 senses).

In the Western World for example, most humans can make detailed transport plans that may include ensuring there is enough petrol in their car, so that they can go to a certain store to purchase ingredients which they will later on use a recipe to make a meal of: perhaps in service of a larger goal like ingratiating... (read more)

I'm not sure what I'm meant to be convinced by in that Wikipedia article - can you quote the specific passage?

I don't understand how that confirms you and I are experiencing the same thing we call orange. To put it another way, imagine a common device in Comedy of Errors: we are in a three-way conversation, and our mutual interlocutor mentions "Bob" and we both nod knowingly. However this doesn't mean that we are imagining "Bob" refers to the same person, I could be thinking of animator Bob Clampett, you could be thinking of animator Bob Mckimson.

Our mutua... (read more)

But that surely just describes the retina and the way light passes through the lens (which we can measure or at least make informed guesses based on the substances and reflectance/absorbtion involved)? How do you KNOW that my hue isn't rotated completely differently since you can't measure it - my experience of it? The wavelengths don't mean a thing.

2Said Achmiz
Absolutely not. What I am talking about has very little to do with “wavelengths”. Example: Consider an orange (that is, the actual fruit), which you have in your hand; and consider a photograph of that same orange, taken from the vantage point of your eye and then displayed on a screen which you hold in your other hand. The orange and the picture of the orange will both look orange (i.e. the color which we perceive as a hybrid of red and yellow), and furthermore they will appear to be the same orange hue. However, if you compare the spectral power distribution (i.e., which wavelengths are present, and at what total intensity) of the light incident upon your retina that was reflected from the orange, with the spectral power distribution of the light incident upon your retina that was emitted from the displayed picture of that same orange, you will find them to be almost entirely non-overlapping. (Specifically, the former SPD will be dominated by light in the ~590nm band, whereas the latter SPD will have almost no light of that wavelength.) And yet, the perceived color will be the same. Perceptual colors do not map directly to wavelengths of light.

No one has refuted it, ever, in my books


Nor can you refute that my qualia experience of green is what you call red, but because every time I see (and subsequently refer to) my red is the same time you see your red, there is no incongruity to suggest any different. However I think entertaining such a theory would be a waste of time.

I see the simulation hypothesis as suffering from the same flaws as the Young Earth Theory: both are incompatible with Occums Razor, or to put it another way, adds unnecessary complexity to a theory of metaphysics without offerin... (read more)

5Said Achmiz
But we can. This sort of “epiphenomenal spectrum inversion” is not possible in humans[1], because human color perception is functionally asymmetric (e.g. the “just noticeable difference” between shades of a hue is not invariant under hue rotation, nor is the shape of identified same-color regions or the size of “prototypical color” sub-regions). ---------------------------------------- 1. We can hypothesize aliens whose color perception works in such a way that allows for epiphenomenal spectrum inversion, but humans are not such. ↩︎

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps one of the most influential Sci-Fi filmmakers of the 20th century, therefore I believe he has some authority on this matter. What may answer the need for dystopia can be extend to war and crime films:
 

...one of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Furthe

... (read more)

Are there pivotal ways this is different to the theories of Enactivism?
(" Its authors define cognition as enaction, which they in turn characterize as the ‘bringing forth’ of domains of significance through organismic activity that has been itself conditioned by a history of interactions between an organism and its environment." which at first blush I'd say is a reflectively stable agent modifying or updating believes by means of enaction. Enactivism also rejects mind-body duality in favour of a more 'embodied' cognition approach together with a "deep cont... (read more)

What about the incentives? PWC is apparently OpenAI's largest enterprise customer. I don't know how much PWC actually use the tools in-house and how much they use to on-sell "Digital Transformation" onto their own and new customers. How might this be affecting the way that OpenAI develop their products?

I have my own theories about the intentions which I do not feel comfortable discussing, so I'll focus on the practicalities and case studies which show why this complex and difficult to execute:
some hostages have been killed by the IDF during rescue operations, this isn't uncommon, the lone hostage was killed during a French raid in Somalia, consider the Lindt Cafe Siege in Sydney where a pregnant hostage was killed by ricocheting police bullet fire when they finally stormed in, three other hostages and a policeman were injured. This was a lone gunman, I c... (read more)

Any good resources which illustrate decision making models for career choices? Particularly ones that help you audit your strengths and weaknesses and therefore potential efficacy in given roles?

I had a look over the E.A. Forum, and there's no decision making models for how to choose a career. There's a lot of "draw the rest of the owl" stuff like - "Get a high paying salary so you can donate". Okay, but how? There's certainly a lot of job openings announced on the forum, but again, how do I know which one's I, me, am best suited to? Which types of positio... (read more)

I meant a personal assistant type A.I. like Alexa or Siri which is capable of exerting Milieu control like Sir Humphrey does: Meta properties, Tik Tok are not yet integrated with such personal A.I. assistants... yet.

This may be pedantry, but is it correct to say "irrefutable evidence"? I know that in the real world the adjective 'irrefutable' has desirable rhetorical force but evidence is often not what is contended or in need of refuting. "Irrefutable evidence" on the face of it means means "yes, we can all agree it is evidence". A comical example that comes to mind is from Quintilian  's treatise that I'll paraphrase and embellish:



"yes, it is true I killed him with that knife, but it was justified because he was an adulterer and by the laws of Rome Legal"



In (mo... (read more)

I don't want to pretend that I'm someone who is immune to Youtube binges or similar behaviors. However I am not sure why this is a problem and what meaningful work that this behavior was getting in the way of? Speaking for myself, 9/10 if I have a commitment the next morning, I won't stay up late on my computer because... I know I have a commitment at a set time. (If you forced me to hypothesize why that 1/10 times I don't, I'd guess that it is stress related anticipation means I can't sleep even if I did lay down - but that is just a wild guess).

I'm also ... (read more)

How can you mimic the decision making of someone 'smarter' or at least with more know-how than you if... you... don't know-how?

Wearing purple clothes like Prince, getting his haircut, playing a 'love symbol guitar' and other superficialities won't make me as great a performer as he was, because the tail doesn't wag the dog.

Similarly if I wanted to write songs like him, using the same drum machines, writing lyrics with "2" and "U" and "4" and loading them with Christian allusions and sexual imagery, I'd be lucky if I'm perceptive enough as a mimic to produc... (read more)

4Viliam
That reminds me of NLP (the pseudoscience) "modeling", so I checked briefly if they have any useful advice, but it seems to be at the level of "draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl". They say you should: * observe the person * that is, imagine being in their skin, seeing through their eyes, etc. * observe their physiology (this, according to NLP, magically gives you unparalleled insights) * ...and I guess now you became a copy of that person, and can do everything they can do * find the difference that makes the difference * test all individual steps in your behavior, whether they are really necessary for the outcome * ...congratulation, now you can do whatever they do, but more efficiently, and you have a good model * design a class to teach that method * ...so now you can monetize the results of your successful research Well, how helpful was that? I guess I wasn't fair to them, the entire algorithm is more like "draw the circle; draw the rest of the fucking owl; erase the unnecessary pieces to make it a superstimulus of the fucking owl; create your own pyramid scheme around the fucking owl".

Different example - I said "instead" - so if the musician openly admits and apologize for only being average they are ashamed because they are afraid of the reaction of the fan who clearly loved their performance (not their failure to abstain from what they believe is the cause of their average performance?), but if they don't mention it to anyone (therefore are committing neither a dominance nor submission gesture) they are also ashamed? Or are they not ashamed in both circumstances? I'm just saying I'm really confused.

Are you telling me there is no conce... (read more)

2Benquo
If you look back, you'll see I was specifically responding to the hypothetical scenario about public admission in that comment. For your points about private shame, you might want to check my other comment replying to you where I addressed how internal shame and self-image maintenance connect to social dynamics. I notice you're attributing positions to me that I haven't taken and expressing confusion about points I've already addressed in detail. It would be helpful if you could engage more carefully with what I've carefully written. You're introducing new elements that weren't in your original scenario. But more importantly: you described the show as "a hit" where "everyone loves them." Calling this performance "only average" isn't accurately revealing adverse information - it's a lie. In my other reply to you, I explained how private shame often involves maintaining conflicting mental models - one that enables confident performance and another that tracks specific flaws for improvement. Even when no one would directly know or care about staying up late drinking, the performer may feel shame because they've invested in an identity as a "professional musician" or "disciplined performer" - an identity that others care about and grant certain privileges to. The shame comes from violating the requirements of this identity, which serves as a proxy for social approval and professional opportunities. This creates internal pressure toward shame even without a specific idea of someone else who would directly condemn the behavior or trait in question. What I'm suggesting is that shame inherently involves at least a tacit social component - some imagined perspective by which we are condemned. This is consistent with Smith's and Hume's moral sentiments theory, where moral judgments fundamentally involve taking up imagined perspectives of others. This doesn't mean the shame isn't genuinely felt or that any specific others would actually condemn us. But in my experience peop

I don't think you understand, in the example I gave they don't think they are 'average' they think their performance was not to the standard they hold themselves, and they believe that this was precipitated by their drinking which they regret. He is talking PAST the person after the show, not to them, almost like a soliloquy.

Do you think that every time you've ever felt shame it has always been primarily because of what others may think of you? You have never ever felt a solipsistic shame, a shame even though no one will know, no one will care, it has no negative influence on anyone other than yourself, and the only person you have to answer to is you? Never?

2Benquo
In this example?

My new TAP for the year is - When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.

I'm persistent but unfortunately I don't know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying "the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results". Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I'll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay - if I don't find it in five minutes, guess I'm losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.

By allowing myself only two mor... (read more)

I'm using Firefox. As of the time of writing after refreshing the page: from the Aristotle quote downwards the entire post is in one 'code block'. The markdown hyperlinks aren't formatting correctly, so I'm seeing the text in square brackets followed by the intended web address in plain text.

How does it look for you?

1Lorec
Edit: Ah, whoops, yes, that'd be the old screwed-up version of the formatting. It must not have updated on your end yet. [I'm using Firefox too.] For me, the code block stops right before "Moriarty looks at the paper", and the Markdown hyperlinks are displaying properly.

How does this work? I can't see any screenshots or videos that show the website interface.

2Adam B
Here's what the question creation interface looks like – you can create any question, and there's a bunch of suggestions to help you get started:   Here's what it looks like when you've created some questions. I made these predictions with my partner, so you can see her predictions on the question that's expanded:   For more info, I'd suggest just using the website itself. It is designed to be super easy to use and self-describing! The website is part of Fatebook, a tool for rapidly tracking predictions. Predict Your Year is a specialised page for creating yearly predictions (which is a popular activity for many people, e.g. inspired by Scott Alexander's annual prediction posts). You can read more about Fatebook in this LessWrong post.

Moriarty looks at the paper.

 

The switch from first person pronouns to discussing a third person with quotations is confusing.

1Lorec
Is the part where the stuff "on the paper" is in a code block visible to you yet? I was messing with the formatting for a while, I couldn't get it to display right. [Thanks for the feedback!]

Why best structured? What quality or cause of reader-comprehension do you think non-linearity in this particular forking format maximizes?

Also aren't most articles written with a singular or central proposition in mind (Gian Carlo Rota said that every lecture should say one thing, Quintillian advised all speeches to have one 'basis'), for which all paragraphs essentially converge on that as a conclusion?

"Is this a good use of my time?"
"No"
"Can I think of a better use of my time?"
"Also, no"
"If I could use this time to think of a better use of my time, that would be a better use of my time than the current waste of time I am now, right?"
"Yes, if.... but you can't so it isn't"
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because, look at how abstract just this little dialogue is - which is wholly representative of the kind of thinking-about-better-uses you're inclined to do (but may not be generalizable to others). This dialogue of ours is not pertaining directly to any actions of tangible value for you. Just hypothesis and abstracts. It is not a good use of your time."

Wouldn't the insight into understanding be in the encoding, particularly how the encoder discriminates between what is necessary to 'understand' a particular function of a system and what is not salient? (And if I may speculate wildly, in organisms may be correlative to dopamine in the Nucleus Accumbens. Maybe.)

All mental models of the world are inherently lossy, this is the map-territory analogy in a nutshell (itself - a lossy model). The effectiveness or usefulness of a representation determines the level of 'understanding' this is entirely dependent on ... (read more)

Meta question for those who have made predictions: How do go about making a prediction? As in What is your prediction making process?

Which I suppose this is really a melange of questions that decomposes into:

Which questions appealed to you as being worth predicting, and why?
How did you determine what specific conditions the question was asking you to make a prediction about?
What was your process for determining your own level of confidence in that state of affairs?
Is the process similar or dissimilar from how you go about making decisions with tangible effects in your personal, familial, and professional life?

Is there a distinction between "true will" and "false will" and how does that factor into free will?

Take the example of someone with total paralysis, or locked-in Syndrome: they are absolutely unable to move any part of their body and therefore not able to manipulate their environment. A non-deterministic view of human consciousness will still suppose that they have free-will to choose what subject is on their mind. They can listen to the ambient sounds of the room, they can imagine a blue triangle or they could choose to imagine a red hexagon.

Thankfully f... (read more)

We should entertain the possibility because it is clearly possible (since it's unfalsifiable), because I care about it, because it can dictate my actions, etc.


What makes you care about it? What makes it persuasive to you? What decisions would you make differently and what tangible results within this presumed simulation would you expect to see differently pursuant to proving this? (How do you expect your belief in the simulation to pay rent in anticipated experiences?)

Also, the general consensus in rational or at least broadly in science is if something is... (read more)

I'm still not sure how it is related.

The implicit fear is that you are in a world which is manufactured because you, the presumed observer are so unique, right? Because you're freakishly tall or whatever.

However, as per the anthropic principle, any universe that humans exist in, and any universe that observer exists in is a universe where it is possible for them to exist. Or to put it another way: the rules of that universe are such that the observer doesn't defy the rules of that universe. Right?

So freakishly tall or average height: by the anthropic princ... (read more)

1AynonymousPrsn123
I don't understand. We should entertain the possibility because it is clearly possible (since it's unfalsifiable), because I care about it, because it can dictate my actions, etc. And the probability argument follows after specifying a reference class, such as "being distinct" or "being a presumptuous philosopher."

I didn't think there was anything off with my tone. But please don't consider my inquisitiveness and lack of understanding anything other than a genuine desire to fill the gaps in my reasoning.

Again, what is your understanding of Kant and German Idealism and why do you think that the dualism presented in Kantian metaphysics is insufficient to answer your question? What misgivings or where does it leave you unsatisfied and why?

I'm not immediately sure how the Presumptious Philosopher example applies here: That is saying that there's theory 1 which has x amo... (read more)

1AynonymousPrsn123
You are misinterpreting the PP example. Consider the following two theories: T1 : I'm the only one that exists, everyone else is an NPC T2 : Everything is as expected, I'm not simulated.  Suppose for simplicity that both theories are equally likely. (This assumption really doesn't matter.) If I define Presumptuous Philosopher=Distinct human like myself=1/(10,000) humans, then I get in most universes, I am indeed the only one, but regardless, most copies of myself are not simulated.

This seems like a very narrow view of shame and guilt to me.

The cognitive processes responsible for the intention to conceal what we call shame are necessarily partitioned from the ones that handle our public, pronormative personas.  If someone senses enough optimization for moral concealment in their self and those around them


What about things we conceal, less because of what other people think of those behaviors but because they are inconsistent with how we see ourselves or the standards we like to hold ourselves to?

For example, a singer songwriter ... (read more)

2Benquo
That’s why I distinguished explicitly between shame and depravity in the OP.
2Benquo
Admitting and apologizing for being 'only average' often functions as a submission move in dominance hierarchies, i.e. pecking orders. This move derails attempts to enact more naïve, descriptive-language accountability. When someone has a specific grievance, it corresponds to a claim about the relation between facts and commitments that can be evaluated as true or false. Responding with self-deprecation transforms their concrete complaint into a mere opportunity to either accept or reject the display of submission. This disrupts the sort of language in which object-level accounting can happen, since the original specific issues are neither addressed nor refuted. Rather, they are displaced by the lower-dimensional social dynamics of dominance and submission. So viewed systemically, such moves are part of a distributed strategy by which pecking orders disrupt and displace descriptive language communities by coordinating to invalidate them. And viewed locally, they erase the specific grievance from common knowledge, preserving the motivating shame.
2Benquo
We conceal some facts about ourselves from ourselves to maintain a self-image because such self-images affect how we present ourselves to others and thus what we can be socially entitled to. This is similar to what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mindset," in contrast with a "growth mindset" where the self-image more explicitly includes the possibility of intentional improvement. In the singer-songwriter example, creating a good vibe with the audience generally involves projecting confidence. This confidence can connect to an identity as a competent performer, which maintains entitlement to the audience's approval as well as other perks like booking future shows and charging higher rates. We might think of the performer as implicitly reasoning, "I must have audience approval in order to maintain my identity. I get audience approval by being a good performer. Therefore I must be a good performer. Good performers perform flawlessly. Therefore I must have performed flawlessly. Staying out late would cause flaws in my performance. Therefore I must not have stayed out late." Meanwhile, improving as a performer requires honestly evaluating weaknesses in one's performance - noticing timing issues, pitch problems, or moments where energy flagged. This evaluation process works best with immediate, specific feedback while memories are fresh. Or, in the specific example you gave, the performer's process of improvement needs to include the specific factual memory that they stayed out late, which likely impaired their performance. When the good vibe with the audience is based on a rigidly maintained self-image, this creates an internal conflict: The same performance needs to be confidently good for maintaining entitlement and specifically flawed to enable improvement. This conflict creates pressure toward shame - the performer must maintain a persona that cannot acknowledge certain facts, while those facts are still actively used to make decisions. Some other prior

I never said "falsified" in that reply - I said fake - a simulation is by definition fake (Edit: Yes I did, and now I see how I've been 'Rabbit Seasoned' - a simulation hypothesis falsifies this reality. I never said this reality is false. My mistake!). That is the meaning of the word in general sense. If i make a indistinguishible replica of the Mona Lisa and pass it off as real, I have made a fake. If some kind of demiurge makes a simulation and passes it off as 'reality' - it is a fake.

I've never heard of "anthropics" but I am familiar with the Anthropi... (read more)

1AynonymousPrsn123
I don't appreciate your tone sir! Anyway, I've now realized that this is a variant on the standard Presumptuous Philosopher problem, which you can read about here if you are mathematically inclined: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HFyami76kSs4vEHqy/p/LARmKTbpAkEYeG43u#1__Proportion_of_potential_observers__SIA

I don't understand how the assumption that we are living in a simulation which is so convincing as to be indistinguishable from a non-simulation is any more useful than the Boltzmann brain, or a brain in a vat, or a psychedelic trip, or that we're all just the fantasy of the boy at the end of St. Elsewhere: since, by virtue of being a convincing simulation it has no characteristic which knowingly distinguishes it from a non-simulation. In fact some of those others would be more useful if true, because they would point to phenomena which would better explai... (read more)

What do you mean by a 'rational mistake'? 

If someone says "always pick the tomato that has a bit of 'bounce'" and, for the sake of demonstration, one wrongly interprets this to mean a tomato, when thrown, should bounce off of a surface - leading to a very messy series of mistakes. When what the original person's map of a 'good tomato test' was that if we press a tomato it should be firm to touch, but not too firm. Isn't that a mistake that is our own - since it didn't exist in the original map? Indeed have we inherited that map at all or created a com... (read more)

Why are you so sure it's a computer simulation? How do you know it's not a drug trip? A fever dream? An unfathomable organism staring into some kind of (to it's particular phenomenology) plugging it's senses into a pseudo-random pattern generator from which is hallucinates or infers the experience of OP?

How could we falsify the simulation hypothesis?

1plex
From the way things sure seem to look, the universe is very big, and has room for lots of computations later on. A bunch of plausible rollouts involve some small fraction of those very large resources going on simulations. You can, if you want, abandon all epistemic hope and have a very very wide prior. Maybe we're totally wrong about everything! Maybe we're Boltzmann brains! But that's not super informative or helpful, so we look around us and extrapolate assuming that's a reasonable thing to do, because we ain't got anything else we can do. Simulations are very compatible with that. The other examples aren't so much, if you look up close and have some model of what those things are like and do.

I'm afraid I don't understand a lot of your assumptions. For example, why you think you being an example of any given superlative is somehow a falsifying observation of the reality - especially if other people/objects don't exist in uniform distributions. So it's not like a video game where every other NPC  exactly 10 HP, but through use of cheat-code you've got 1000. And even so, that data from within the 'simulation' as you call it is not proof of something 'without'. I think the only evidence of that would be if you find yourself in a situation lik... (read more)

0AynonymousPrsn123
My argument didn't even make those assumptions. Nothing in my argument "falsified" reality, nor did I "prove" the existence of something outside my immediate senses. It was merely a probabilistic, anthropic argument. Are you familiar with anthropics? I want to hear from someone who knows anthropics well. Indeed, your video game scenario is not even really qualitatively different from my own situation. Because if I were born with 1000 HP, you could still argue "data from within the 'simulation'...is not proof of something 'without'." And you could update your "scientific" understanding of the distribution of HP to account for the fact that precisely one character has 1000 HP. The difference between my scenario and the video game one is merely quantitative: Pr(1000 HP | I'm not in a video game) < Pr(I'm a superlative | I'm not in a simulation), though both probabilities are very low.

I tried a couple of times to tune my cognitive strategies. What I expected was that by finding the types of thinking and the pivotal points in chains/trains of thought that lead to the 'ah-ha' moment of insight. I could learn to cultivate the mental state where I was more prone or conducive to those a-ha moments, in the same way that actors may use Sense Memory in order to revisit certain emotions.

Was this expectation wrong?

It seemed like all I found was a kind of more effective way of noticing that I was "in a rut". However that in itself didn't propagate... (read more)

I'm not sure what the objective is here, are you trying to build a kind of Quine prompt? If so why? What attracts you to this project, but more importantly (and I am projecting my own values here) what pragmatic applications? What specific decisions do you imagine you or others here may make differently based on the information you glean from this exercise?

If it's not a Quine that you're trying to produce, what is it exactly that you're hoping to achieve by this recursive feeding and memory summarization loop?

It would be good if you have thoughts on this,

... (read more)
1ollie_
It started out with the idea to make a system that can improve itself, without me having to prompt it to improve itself. The "question" is the prompt. And crafting the prompt is very difficult. So it's an experiment in constructing a question that a system can use to improve itself without having to explicitly say "improve your codebase" or "give yourself more actions or freedoms" or others like that. I want the llm to conjure up ideas. So as the prompt increases in complexity, with different sections that could be categorised as kinds of human thought, will it get better? Can we find parallels between how the human minds works that can be translated into a prompt. A key area that developed was using the future as well as the past in the prompt. Having memories is an obvious inclusion, as is including what happened in the past runs of the program, but what wasn't obvious was including predictions for the future. Including the ability to make long and short term predictions, and have it be able to change these, and record the outcomes, saw big improvements in the directions it would take over time. It also seemed to 'ground it'. Without the predictions space, it became overly concerned with its performance metrics as a proxy for improvement and it began over-optimising. Defining 'better' or 'improving' is very difficult. Right now, i'm using token input size growth whilst maintaining clarity of thought as the rough measure.

I'd love to know the mechanics of "sleep on it" are and why it appears to work. Do you have any theories or hunches about what is happening on a cognitive level?

2keltan
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It seems to link to many things. And might be a bit too much for just a comment. But here are some key concepts from mostly psych that I think link to why sleeping on a problem makes it easier. * Hebb's Law * Learning is assumed to take place over a 24hr span * Chunking * The Multi-component Model of Working Memory * Mice developing 'Maze Neurons' when learning a maze * People who are woken mid-sleep and self report dreaming about a problem they've tried to solve, do better the next day than people who are woken and don't report dreaming about the problem If I boil it down, I have two hypotheses that could both be true. 1. When you dream about a problem you're brain is formulating ideas that can help you solve it. All you have to do the next day is try again and those ideas will become available to you as if you had just 'had an idea' 2. Sleeping on a problem breaks it up into more manageable chunks that you can better manipulate in working memory the next time you try to solve it.  There are other things that happen during sleep that will just make every problem easier to solve the next day. For example:  * Cleaning up chemical 'garbage' that collects in your brain during the day. * Forgetting things that the brain doesn't think you have a use for * Resetting/reducing your emotions. (If you're stressed about a new problem, you'll find it easier to solve it when you're less stressed.)

Thanks for preserving with my questions and trying to help me find an implementation. I'm going to try and reverse engineer my current approach to handles.

Oh of course, 100% retention is impossible. As ridiculous and arbitrary as it is, I'm using Sturgeon's law as a guide for now.

I constantly think about that Tweet where it's a woman saying she doesn't AI to write or do art, she wants it (but more correctly that's the purview of robotics isn't it?) to do her laundry and dishes so that she can focus on things she enjoys like writing and art.

Of course, A.I. in the form of Siri and Alexa or whatever personal assistant you use is already a stone's throw away from being in a unhealthy codependent relationship with us (I've never see the film 'Her' but I'm not discussing the parasocial relationship in that film). I'm talking about the li... (read more)

2Viliam
but... it already does :( I mean, on facebook and xitter and reddit; I am still free to control my browsing of substack and yes, applying the same level of control to my real life sounds like a bad idea

I find it useful to start with a clear prompt (e.g. 'what if X', 'what does Y mean for Z', or whatever my brain cooks up in the moment) and let my mind wander around for a bit while I transcribe my stream of consciousness. After a while (e.g. when i get bored) I look back at what I've written, edit / reorganise a little, try to assign some handle, and save it. 

That is helpful, thank you. 
 

I think you shouldn't feel chained to your past notes? If certain thoughts resonate with you, you'll naturally keep thinking about them.

This doesn't match ... (read more)

2Daniel Tan
Note that I think some amount of this is inevitable, and I think aiming for 100% retention is impractical (and also not necessary). If you try to do it you'll probably spend more time optimising your knowledge system than actually... doing stuff with the knowledge.   It's also possible you could benefit from writing better handles. I guess for film, good handles could look like a compelling title, or some motivating theme / question you wanted to explore in the film. Basically, 'what makes the film good?' Why did it resonate with you when you re-read it? That'll probably tell you how to give a handle. Also, you can have multiple handles. The more ways you can reframe something to yourself the more likely you are to have one of the framings pull you back later. 

Brainstorming (or babbling) is not random. Nor would we want it to be truly random in most cases. Whether we are operating in a creative space like lyric writing or prose, or writing a pedagogical analogy, or doing practical problem solving on concrete issues. We don’t actually want true randomness, but have certain intentions or ideas about what kind of ideas we’d like to generate. What we really want is to avoid clichés or instinctual answers – like the comic trope of someone trying to come up with a pseudonym, seeing a Helmet in their line of sight and ... (read more)

I am a big fan of the humility and the intention to help others by openly reflecting on these lessons, thank you for that.

5jmh
Agree. There is that old saying about even fools learning from their own mistakes but wise men learning from the mistakes of others. But if everyone is trying to hide their mistakes, that might limit how much learning the wise can do. I had not really thought about this before, but after seeing your comment the question struck me if social/cultural norms about social status and "loosing face" don't impact scientific advancement.

Asking "what outputs should I expect to see?". While this post is about finding ways to build techniques for practicing Rationality Techniques, the examples are also very illustrative for thinking about what something looks like in practice or answering the question "what does that mean (in concrete, doable terms)?" 

I also find that using verbs of manner helps make thinking about actions more specific - things that can be done.

For example, "what's for dinner?" can become "What should I cook for dinner?" which can even become further specified by manne... (read more)

25% of the time it being helpful sounds pretty good to me.

Just to be clear, when you say "undirected thinking" do you mean thinking that is not pertinent to your intention or goal with a writing session or a piece of writing; or is it knowing that you want to write something but wandering aimlessly because you're not sure what that thing is? Or am I well off the mark on both?

1keltan
Closer to the first one. I find when writing to think my mind has two modes. Very system 1 and system 2. If I’ve been going for a while on a side branch system 1 takes over. The writing becomes less about thinking and more about the act of writing. This leads to me making a hypothesis and saying “idk why that is”. That triggers the alias, which points out to me that I’m not really ‘thinking’. I then switch to “How could I test if this is true?” I appreciate the 25% reframing. That’s something I wish I’d thought faster. Trigger: I see a %# Action: Switch it in my head

This is cool to me. I for one am very interested and find some of your shortforms very relevant to my own explorations, for example note taking and your "sentences as handles for knowledge" one. I may be in the minority but thought I'd just vocalize this.

I'm also keen to see how this as an experiment goes for you and what reflections, lessons, or techniques you develop as a result of it.

How often do these things become "un-confused" - like for every 20 of these, how many do you have an "ah-ha" or a "now I see" moment of clear resolution? Following on, do you find that you're able to find a way to think of that faster - i.e. that you can see what cognitive processes cause you to be confused and how you could have resolved that quicker?

2keltan
This isn’t an extremely useful technique. What it really does for me is break me out of undirected thinking with my writing and get me to actively start thinking things like “ok, but why would this be happening?” I think 75% of the time it’s not helpful. Sometimes unhelpful when breaking a flow. I’m working on thinking things faster. Though, it’s not a skill I’d say I have yet. However, it’s pretty low cost for any payoff at all.

What does GOOD Zettlekastern capturing look like? I've never been able to make it work. Like, what do the words on the page look like? What is the optima formula? How does one balance the need for capturing quickly and capturing effectively?

The other thing I find is having captured notes, and I realize the whole point of the Zettlekasten is inter-connectives that should lead to a kind of strategic serendipity. Where if you record enough note cards about something, one will naturally link to another.

However I have not managed to find a system which allows m... (read more)

1Daniel Tan
"Future useful" to me means two things: 1. I can easily remember the rough 'shape' of the note when I need to and 2. I can re-read the note to re-enter the state of mind I was at when I wrote the note.  I think writing good handles goes a long way towards achieving 1, and making notes self-contained (w. most necessary requisites included, and ideas developed intuitively) is a good way to achieve 2. 
2Daniel Tan
Hmm I get the sense that you're overcomplicating things. IMO 'good' Zettelkasten is very simple.  1. Write down your thoughts (and give them handles) 2. Revisit your thoughts periodically. Don't be afraid to add to / modify the earlier thoughts. Think new thoughts following up on the old ones. Then write them down (see step 1).  I claim that anybody who does this is practising Zettelkasten. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is gatekeeping what is (IMO) a very simple and beautiful idea. I also claim that, even if you feel this is clunky to begin with, you'll get better at it very quickly as your brain adjusts to doing it. ' Good Zettelkasten isn't about some complicated scheme. It's about getting the fundamentals right.  Now on to some object level advice.  I find it useful to start with a clear prompt (e.g. 'what if X', 'what does Y mean for Z', or whatever my brain cooks up in the moment) and let my mind wander around for a bit while I transcribe my stream of consciousness. After a while (e.g. when i get bored) I look back at what I've written, edit / reorganise a little, try to assign some handle, and save it.  It helps here to be good at making your point concisely, such that notes are relatively short. That also simplifies your review.  I agree that this is ideal, but I also think you shouldn't feel compelled to 'force' interconnections. I think this is describing the state of a very mature Zettelkasten after you've revisited and continuously-improved notes over a long period of time. When you're just starting out I think it's totally fine to just have a collection of separate notes that you occasionally cross-link.  I think you shouldn't feel chained to your past notes? If certain thoughts resonate with you, you'll naturally keep thinking about them. And when you do it's a good idea to revisit the note where you first captured them. But feeling like you have to review everything is counterproductive, esp if you're still building the habit. FWIW I

I was under the impression it was a deliberate decision, as the aphorism of Empedocles goes:

What needs saying needs saying twice

Related is what Horace wrote
 

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure

Now in case you didn't realize I'm going meta, by repeating similar sentiments over and over. So I'll refer to Professor of Negotiation Strategy Deepak Malhotra who advises would be negotiators:
 

Don't leave it to chance that they interpret what you're saying

Pithy, concise, brief statements lack context. This increases the chances they wil... (read more)

The fact that you have and are using flowcharts for that use is very validating to me, because I've been trying to create my own special flowcharts to guide me through diagnostic questions on a wide range of situations for about 6 months down.

Are you willing or able to share any of yours? Or at the very least what observations you've made about the ones you use the most or are most effective? (Obviously different courses for different horses/adjust the seat - everyone will have different flowcharts depending on their own meta-cognitive bottlenecks)

Mine has... (read more)

5Eli Tyre
Here's an example.  This was process I tried for a while to make transitioning out of less effective states easier, by reducing the cognitive overhead. I would basically answer a series of questions to navigate a tree of possible states, and then the app would tell me directly what to do next, instead of my needing to diagnose what was up with me free-form, and then figure out how to respond to that, all of which was unaffordable when I was in a low-efficacy state. * State modulation process: * Start: #[[state modulation notes]] * Is this a high activation state or a low activation state? * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[High activation]]}} * Am I currently compulsive / stimulation hungry / reactive / urgey? * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[yes]]}} * {{[[TODO]]}} Generate a random number between 0 and 2 * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[Untitled]]}} * {{[[TODO]]}} 0 * [Hypothesized approach] * {{[[TODO]]}} **Do 3 minutes of cardio to clear cache. ** * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[Untitled]]}} * {{[[TODO]]}} **Take some breaths to clear space and then check in with what's present for me. ** * {{[[TODO]]}} 1 * [Hypothesized approach] * {{[[TODO]]}} Meditate into the sensation for 4 minutes * {{[[TODO]]}} 2 * [Hypothesized approach] * {{[[TODO]]}} Alternating warm-cold shower * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[no]]}} * Activated - What is the flavor of the activation? * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[[Overwhelm / bursting with threads]]}} * **Write out all my threads on note-cards. ** * {{[[TODO]]}} {{[["Left over activation"]]}} * One of: * {{[[TODO]]}} Just sit with the sensation, observing it, and feeling the space around it. * {{[[TODO]]}} Just focus on my breath. * {{[[TODO]]}} Intentional

Thank you so much, I can see you've put a lot of thought and effort into this reply. I'm going to come back to this later and try and internalize as much as I can.

I do like your advice about low-stakes platforms to calibrate with, 'challenge rounds' of editing, and leaning into extremes of a voice. Those all feel very actionable but not things I think I've tried yet.
 

"Also, don't assume the reader will read to the end."

That's a good heuristic! Front load, like you say, like a newspaper article - inverted pyramid or whatever they call it. 

Excellent question but the answer is "No". I read a fair amount but also are most translations of Aristotle good writing? Probably not - Aristotle is famously obtuse. Is Wittgenstein good writing? I have no idea but also his writing is probably idiomatically suited to the content of the ideas he's trying to express. I was recently reading Seneca, is he a good writer?

I used to read a lot of Nabokov who is certainly a good writer but that clearly did me no good.

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