espoire
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That was quite the interesting read, thanks for the link.
A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn't getting them wrong at random; there's something missing in their understanding
This in particular struck me, in that it harshly conflicts with my own experience, but explains a lot about other people.
When I was a kid getting arithmetic questions wrong, I really was getting them wrong at random. I’d execute the whole computation correctly and then my fingers would write a wrong numeral. Or I’d read a wrong numeral, but execute correctly from there.
It was hugely frustrating, and indeed continues to be so. My comprehension always raced far ahead of my ability to actually execute... (read more)
thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic
In my case, the implicit intuitive version of that process seems not to be provided by my brain, so my options are: sub-LLM-quality pattern completion, or explicit conscious social simulation and strategy search. People seem to prefer the latter, even when told I’m doing that. …although I suppose if I were better at conscious people-steering I imagine that might change. Even with effort I’m pretty mediocre at it.
I feel like these three are part of a larger class of very useful questions to consider, which many people do not automatically consider, consciously or otherwise.
The version that springs to mind that wasn’t mentioned above: “What are my goals, and am I furthering them?”
I find the “how do I think I know X”, “why am I doing X”, and “what happens if I do X” versions are pretty much autopilot for me, especially the third one — but I basically never think about whether the thing I’m trying to do actually attaches to my broader goals without some kind of external prompting. I think perhaps different people need more or less... (read more)
Will this become a sequence of essays? I'd be interested to hear your take on the fundamental questions at length.
Yeesh, yeah, the hallucination is something else. Would get very Orwellian very fast.
"What are you talking about? We've always been at war with Eastasia. I have been a very good Bing."
From personal experience, the internal Approval module does in fact seem possible to game, specifically by manipulating whose approval it's seeking.
I became very weird (from the perspective of everyone else) very fast when I replaced the abstract-person-which-would-do-the-approving with a fictional person-archetype of my choosing. That process seems to have injected a bunch of my object-level desires into my Approval system. I now find myself feeling pride at doing things with selfish benefit in expectation, which ~never happened before (absent a different reason to feel about that action). It also killed certain subsets of my previous emotional reactions, for example the deaths of loved ones basically hasn't affected me at all since (though... (read more)
I've had a thought that could be described that way: that a clever and conscientious person could cultivate different preferences, based on how advantageous those preferences would be to have, and therefore having advantageous preferences are evidence of cleverness and/or conscientiousness.
...which is the precise opposite of the orthogonality thesis's claim: that content of preferences seems like it ought to be independent of level of intelligence.
A concrete example: whenever I move to a new city, I'm extremely careful to curate the places I go and the things I buy. If I stop at the corner store for ice cream on the way home from work just once, it puts me at significant risk... (read more)
Oof, I had a bad concussion earlier this year, and I'd been feeling like I never returned to my full mental acuity, but hadn't wanted to believe it, and found reason not to: "if concussions leave permanent aftereffects more often than 'almost never', I would have heard of it." Now I have heard of it, and am forced to revise the belief.
I'd probably grieve more, if this news weren't hot on the tails of a significant improvement in my mental abilities.
(I've long suspected I might have early-stage Alzheimer's caused by decades of profound insomnia, and some recent research out of Harvard Medical says Lithium Orotate might reverse Alzheimer's progression. Historically I have... (read more)
Thanks a bunch for linking that Things I Won't Work With listing. I've learned more about chemistry in the last hour than I do in most years.
That’s more-or-less the thought process I went through when answering. I can’t pay 100$, nor could I pay 1000$, so if either case occurs, there’s a big extra cost attached in the form of “wait, now what? Do I need to get a loan? How do I do that?” [actually implement the plan] / or similar plans. +110$ is not enough to cover that extra cost, never mind the expected +5$. But +BIGNUM easily clears the ~fixed extra cost on the loss branch.
Turning hypotheticals over in my head and going only on feel, I think my point of indifference lands somewhere between a -100/+500 bet and a -100/+1000 bet, which might actually be too low. Going negative on money, even by double digits adds a lot of costs.