Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a residue of your internal monolog, and those signals can be measured objectively.

I've heard about that and that looked like an evidence that you are able to untrain only things which are introspectively visible, not that it is somewhat important. Again, what about deaf-mute, what do they subvocalize? And "a bit faster"? 5000 phonemes/min, ~100/s, more looks like 1 phonem... (read more)

Do someone know something like "synesthesia" browser extension for better legibility? It should paint black-and-white letters into colored, probably saving intensity.

But it depends which speed do you read? If it's 800-1000wpm (4000-5000 letter/min), then I maybe wrong.

Some apriori reasoning like: pronoucing goes a consequences, one token at time, but brain is 200Hz is consequence, brain is better in being parallel with all these 80M neurons, and also words have meaning as a whole, so most of step by step letters don't even contain meaning.

And next evidence from experience to this apriori reasoning: when I succeed to stop pronouncing I can see and understand three words at a moment. Also I wrote whole shortpost here about my experience with trying to replace usual speech into visual thinking. (you need "visual thinking" section)

IIRC you are wrong, lenses are just different ways to see the page of same topic. They're also used for "version ML programmers", "version for DT professors", "version for usual people". Or for Wikipedia it would be "scientifically precise encyclopedia" and "quickly get useful info about topic for usual person".

Edit: oh, also, as I know, lenses are from tvtropes (caution: addictive memetic hazard)

Very cool. I probably already for two years wondered why to have Arbital as additional site instead of doing it on LW. And that would be very good if now I will be able to read it without bugs and even make edits (easily, by three clicks!). I also like that there are tabs instead of "lenses", I've always thought that "lense" is improper idea if it can show you completely different set of contents.

Also I for a long time thought that it would be good to post Sequences, HPMoR and some other things as wiki pages, they are too crucial for LW to their edit... (read more)

(There was some errors, message hadn't sent before now)

Becoming stronger feels like things became lighter. But a lot of things I trying to do are not "just easy"? Also I thought about it more like finding things which you found too hard and gave up. And I am not sure how to just pinpoint easy things, it's like finding details of how you are moving.

(Though I probably should expect that for a lot of people it's actually hard to from the first try read/remember even single time new long words like "cefoperazone" and "ceftazidime" and that wasn't just a trope)... (read more)

The most useful my ideas to write in details:

• Thinking is the most powerful human ability which differ us from animals
• You can develop any aspect of your brain/thinking/neurons by training
  • You don't need to be restricted by existing ones, you can invent them
• You can develop your thinking and next invent by it better ways to develop thinking
• Introspection is really important, because it's really hard to develop thinking blindly
• Ordinary processes of learning are INCREDIBLY ineffective, you can do better
  • eg, anki, pomodoro timed learning, remembering images, not wo

Whole my life I hated reading. Now I have a better understanding why and what to do with that.

I read slow because I am pronouncing things, I pronounce things because I want to have emotions from intonations, I need that because I don't imagine a lot. And as a bonus I am pronouncing things, not just perceiving audibly, so reading for me is an effort, in comparison with listening.

Unfortunately pronouncing also is a very stable habit, it's really hard to not pronounce things. I will try to use rhythms for speed reading.

My knowledge state

Read books: HPMoR x7, Sequences x3, planecrash x2, "You're joking Mr Feynman" x3, GEB 1/4, Fast and Slow Thinking 1/3

Didn't read: all the other rationalist books. And just almost no books, probably the one I can remember is Better Angels of Our Nature.

Have read some Wikipedia pages.

Have 99.9%, 110K words on Russian on https://myvocab.info 

Watched a lot of popular science YouTube videos and lectures, mostly sciences, almost no the most useful ones like evolutionary/behavioral/cognitive psychology, neurobiology, information theory, pro... (read more)

TLDR

From Russia, hated reading, was grateful to science, liked clever things, cheats, computers, coded since 9y, was going to become a programmer, read HPMoR at 12, but didn't tried to solve any riddle, didn't read sequences until 16y, until 2023 didn't understood that rationality isn't about Truth, it's about Skills. Now trying to generate maximally useful thoughts, post some on LW.

Current Detailed

I am from Russia. I liked to watch Discovery and other scientific channels from an age of ~7. I never liked to read, only listened sometimes, and when I have gone into school, I understood that books lied, we didn't have nicks, bullies, D-graders or A-graders (I got some As, but Bs too, and no one got only As), there were no any correlation between being a good student, wearing glasses, liking reading and playing chess.

When I was 9 I learned some programming, I decided that I will work as a programmer when I grew up, because programmers do ... (read more)

EniScien's Bio thread

Optimising internal dialogue

Never repeating thoughts technique

In planecrash EY shows technique of "never repeating same thoughts". And it can look useful, like what if you was repeating your thoughts for 10 times? You could get 10x more thoughts by that. Sort of like if you had 10 times more time for thinking, which looks really useful.

But when I actually started to practice it, I noticed, that actually a lot of time I spend on replacing last word by better synonym, a lot of time I rephrase the end of sentence, or whole sentence, or whole paragraph. That I... (read more)

Rephrased

I am not sure what is unclear. But I many times noticed that my brain is very confused seeing eg EY's recent post about Lies Told to Kids with 360 karma and comparing it some post of sequences that got "pitiful" 100+. And it looked like an example of inflation, that recent much less cool post gets a few times more karma. And I don't know how calibrate my brain, and using some software solution looks easier.

I am suspicious to and don't like using some weird sidesteppings, instead of not being confused while looking on the question from the position of "how it will actually look in the world/situation" (though they can be faster, yeah).

I mean, causes are real, future was caused by you, may be say controlled, and it less feels like controlling something if somebody predicts by wishes and performs them before I can think about their fulfilling.

But these are probably just trade-offs of trying to explain these things to people in plain English.

When I first thought... (read more)

What is the Sense of writing quick takes at the same page with worse editor if next you got kicked out to fast takes page?!

I've just found out Inflation Adjusted Karma Sorting and started to wish it be implemented into standard karma viewing system

Update: I am certainly lost some writing skills... Or, more precisely, I can't at the same time use my old writing skills and successfully think new thoughts, they are too distant in mental space. That makes things harder, I am not sure what to do with that.

One of very important problems here is that my old wring skills are to tightly weaven as a habit. Do someone know solution for such problems?

I think I written my bio in some biased way. But yeah, even in modern Russia it's not a very popular frame that you are so unique and exceptional. And our teacher said us "not to run faster than a whole train". And modesty is a virtue, but admitting how very excellent are is not at all.

And in part it were things like my parents were trying to make me less perfectionist about grades by saying that "grades doesn't really matter", then I continued be a perfectionist, but now just thought that grades are not at all a measure of intelligence.

Or that I was progr... (read more)

I think I finally got clear understanding of Newcomb-like problems. I am afraid that I again will think about some EY's post which I read and forgot. But just write it will be faster, than search.

I think the cause of why people stuck with these problems are wrong intuitions that your decisions "change the future". Which are obviously wrong if you think about it, it's not like in Past there was one Future, but now now in Present and Future there are another Future.

It's wrong like think that if you run computer program, in the process of calculation it will ... (read more)

One of the problems is that if my contribution may be more valuable, then it may be also dangerous. I was trying to create techniques to generally increase intelligence, and it looks like I have at least some success. But they are not rational techniques, not an asymetrical weapon. (Ok, some may be at least a little, if I think)

I think like "may be their using can help with AI alignment", but I don't want to their using instead helped with destroying our world faster.

And probably nothing will happen... I just don't want to be careless and post Roko Basilis... (read more)

Firefox added tab groups! Finally! I'd joked that it's a sign of the end of the world, but it doesn't look very funny now. Unfortunately, the same with vertical tabs, it's on PC, where it's completely useless, where there are tree tabs add-ons which are just better.

Does somebody know, how to get features of Touch-To-Search and fast switching between bottom bar of tabs like in chrome, but with extensions like in Firefox, and with sync, so not kiwi?

The situation with that is so desperate, that I start to want to make VR glasses linux computer like some enthu... (read more)

If LW is tiny, I think I understand much better why no one wrote AGI Ruin before EY. I thought about that, but just for a few seconds. I also thought that LW is full of smart people, then if it isn't done yet, not mentioned as "needed task", then probably it's not that good idea, or there are much more important things to spend time on.

(I will consider it as getting some evidence, so, thanks)

I mean, I just thought in the way of "yeah, not all of people on twitter will come to LW", but I was on LW even though I wasn't on twitter. And there are also Facebook, Reddit, SSC and other PBlogs, and people who prefer to meetup instead of using online, and people in other countries.

And also so much people read HPMoR. And I personally, if look back on my life story, don't see any division moments where I was prone even a little to change my direction in which I was going after reading HPMoR, way co... (read more)

(It's vague, but I'll try it broad right NOW. And then elaborate if necesssary.)

I.

I've just noticed comments of Raemon, Gwern and Vladimir_Nesov on my old post and it struck me that maybe I was wrong and LW community is much tinier than I thought. It explains a lot. Flaws of site design, lack of any galactic ideas I momentarily internally spit out seeing things, whole tiny success of rationality and alignment missions.

Probably there are just not enough people for all of that? And I was wrong estimating by EY's 140K twitter, count of readers of HPMoR. And S... (read more)

I noticed some problems with LW interface, quick list

(Ep status: follow my intuition, by saying "you" instead of "I" mean that I expect that these intuitions will be shared by a lot of other users)

Priority for me of these are such items where using is still very inconvenient, not just hard to understand for new users. There are: 1 - reactions, 2 - markdown OR colours (I don't know, mb obsidian solves markdown)

On android

• I have no Intercom on Android, property checked, on PC I do have
• Reactions
  • inline reaction button shows up outside of page bounds, so I need

Self review 1

Now I suspect that I completely wrongly projected my feelings on reasoning. 

Maybe I am just less collectivist, more individual than most people. 

Or maybe the question is that don't actually like their country of birth the most (eg I like my species of birth the most), but more On The Side Of Blue Country vs Red. And saying obviously wrong things like everybody going like "MY country is the best". And iirc I was even as a child when seen things like "mom, you're the best in the world" mentally going like "oh, really, by which qualitie... (read more)

Oh. It looks like I just understood what was EY's point in "Keltham wrote first version of [text] and than rewrote it". I just accidentally did this and it seems that it is much more effective and quick to do not any fixes at all on the first writing, just write out thoughts for yourself, and next write version with all the obvious fixes, than to constantly erase and make local fixes. It's just important not to start trying to do second order fixes on "for publication" version. 

(Context: earlier he wrote that he has problem with constant fixing/rewriting. I guess it may be representation of his found out fix.)

Somehow I manage to be dismissing/condescending even to myself. Like "oh, this old just didn't thought about writing his reasoning to LW". When actually systematically it turns out that I or someone else thought, even tried, but. This. Thought. Had. Failed. To. Work. 

I actually HAD wrote a post with a significant part of my reasoning: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zbSsSwEfdEuaqCRmz/eniscien-s-shortform?commentId=mv3YpuL6tDTtTF7Dv 

Self review 1

I was wrong before OP observation, but in "narrow professional skills can't give you Rationality" it wasn't OP's update of "narrow can't", it was "professional skills are narrow". They aren't. Our world just can't systematically define premises on which professional skill works, optimise it to abstract non narrow principle and then teach to everybody who frequently mets these premises. 

Self review 2

There is a difference between "better than default option" and "the best of all moderately easily searchable options". And I doubt I've done the second search at all, not just done first and congratulated myself. I definitely wasn't asking "which language is more useful/pleasant to learn - English, German, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Esperanto etc" or "which exercises are the most useful/pleasant - language, mnemonic, speedreading, mental arithmetic etc" 

Edit: actually, now I think it would be better to learn speedreading instead of German, t... (read more)

I tried it. Unfortunately, I was trying to set marks on books by all parameters of being good book, instead of accessing just pleasure of reading, which was the only actually important thing to access, because recommendations for others I can get by other ways. And it ended up that now I don't know how to clear my profile. 

Self review

(I've already wrote here something about meaningfulness of competition, but it's hard to parse, so just rewrite)

less try to follow usual society justifications of why thing "makes sense" and more wonder for "which multiple forces conjure thing into reality".

Eg:

different stimuli make people perform different behaviour

you need vengeance to be proportional to harm so people will not eg try hide lesser crimes as stealing by making bigger crimes like killing (those who knew about lesser crimes)

competing with somebody of achievable level make people apply efforts into optimising thing of competition to seize it's prizes

Object level 2y later comments

Now I though think it should be derived apriori, like, as toy model: LET there is 1B people, average can have 1 idea/day, 1 of 1K 100 idea/day, 1 of 1B 1M idea/day, you have 84000s/day and need 84s/idea for comprehension. THEN 1 of 1K has only 1/10 his ideas created by him, so priors to meet somebody with more created ideas than read are lower than 1/1K, AND just the average people create 1M times more ideas than can be read, at best you will know 0.0001% of ideas your world has. 

Yeah. I reread today and thought that it could be replaced by link to it and phrase "then if you see that somebody is very smart and spits out brilliant new looks on things, it may be question of cumulative/crystalized intelligence, not only fluid". 

(But when I tried to find part about TPOT by using keywords like "Carissa Ri-Dul TPOT Oppara", I found out... the search giving me nothing. So today I didn't have hope to find a fragment in reasonable time)

Wow. I look at it again 2y later and as exception of sort of my personal absolute rule it doesn't look absolutely terrible, it looks almost good. I am not sure about the reasons. Mb I managed to wrote it for external reader, not just spit out thought. I doubt it's because I "acquired decent level of rationality". 

That's sort of Welcome (Back) Post. My mistakes analysis. Or confession.

I probably solved a problem that iirc I had my whole life: being VERY upset by losing at all, like, school grades, losing games (even to AI) etc. By posting on LW I could ever get down votes. And did. But I was trying post still, I had ideas I wanted to publish.

And as a full surprise, reinforcement turned out to work such way, that if you overcome it in end-step of thought-action sequence, it will just strike your earlier steps. Eg I became less able to think about posting. And I didn'... (read more)

I saw that a lot of people are confused by "what does Yudkowsky mean by this difference between deep causes and surface analogies?". I didn't have this problem, with no delay I had interpretation what he means.

I thought that it's difference between deep and surface regarding to black box metaphor. Difference between searching correlation between similar inputs and outputs and building a structure of hidden nodes and checking the predictions with rewarding correct ones and dividing that all by complexity of internal structure.

Difference between making step ... (read more)

I noticed that some names here have really bad connotations (although I am not saying that I know which don't, or even that any hasn't).

"LessWrong" looks like "be wrong more rare" and one of obvious ways to it is to avoid difficult things, "be less wrong" is not a way to reach any difficult goal. (Even if different people have different goals)

"Rationality: from A to Z" even worse, it looks like "complete professional guide about rationality" instead of "incomplete basic notes about a small piece of rationality weakly understood by one autodidact" which it actually is.

There are no common words upvote/downvote in Russian, so I just said like/dislike. And it was really a mistake, these are two really different types of positive/negative marks, agree/disagree is third type and there may be any amount of other types. But I named it like/dislike, so I so thought about it like it means your power of liking it in form of outcome to author, not just adjusting the sorting like "do I want to see more posts like that higher in suggestions".

And actually it looks for me like a more general tendency in my behaviour to avoid finding s... (read more)

Does the LessWrong site use a password strength check like the one Yudkowsky talks about (I don't remember that one)? And if not, why not? It doesn't seem particularly difficult to hook this up to a dictionary or something. Or is it not considered worth implementing because there's Google registration?

Hmm. Judging from the brief view, it feels like I'm the only one who included reactions in my brief forms. I wonder why?

It occurred to me that on LessWrong there doesn't seem to be a division of posts in evaluations into those that you want to promote as relevant right now, and those that you think will be useful over the years. If there was such an evaluation... Or such a response, then you could take a list not of karma posts, which would include those that were only needed sometime in a particular moment, but a list of those that people find useful beyond time.

That is, a short-term post might be well-written, really required for discussion at the time, rather than just r... (read more)

A. I saw a post that reactions were added. I was just thinking that this would be very helpful and might solve my problem. Included them for my short forms. I hope people don't just vote no more without asking why through reactions.

On the one hand, I really like that on LessWrong, unlike other platforms, everything unproductive is downgraded in the rating. But on the other hand, when you try to publish something yourself, it looks like a hell of a black box, which gives out positive and negative reinforcements for no reason at all.

This completely chaotic reward system seems to be bad for my tendency to post anything at all on LessWrong, just in the last few weeks that I've been using EverNote, it has counted 400 posts, and by a quick count, I have about 1500 posts lying in Google Ke... (read more)

I must say, I wonder why I did not see here speed reading and visual thinking as one of the most important tips for practical rationality, that is, a visual image is 2 + 1 d, and an auditory image is 0 + 1 d, plus auditory images use sequential thinking, in which people are very bad, and visual thinking is parallel. And according to Wikipedia, the transition from voice to visual reading should speed you up 5 (!) times, and in the same way, visual thinking should be 5 times faster compared to voice, and if you can read and think 5 times in a lifetime mor... (read more)

Yudkowsky says that public morality should be derived from personal morality, and that personal morality is paramount. But I don't think this is the right way to put it, in my view morality is the social relationships that game theory talks about, how not to play games with a negative sum, how to achieve the maximum sum for all participants.

And morality is independent of values, or rather, each value system has its own morality, or even more accurately, morality can work even if you have different value systems. Morality is primarily about questions of jus... (read more)

I added link to comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence