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...
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.
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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?
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
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...
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,
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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?
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?
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...
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...
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...
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.
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)