Emotionally Detatch yourself from your Ideas
Here is a model of mine, that seems related.
[Edit: Add Epistemic status]
Epistemic status: I have used this successfully in the past and found it helpful. It is relatively easy to do. is large for me.
I think it is helpful to be able to emotionally detach yourself from your ideas. There is an implicit "concept of I" in our minds. When somebody criticizes this "concept of I", it is painful. If somebody says "You suck", that hurts.
There is an implicit assumption in the mind that this concept of "I" is eternal. This has the effect, that when somebody says "You suck", it is actually more like they say "You sucked in the past, you suck now, and you will suck, always and ever".
In order to emotionally detach yourself from your ideas, you need to sever the links in your mind, between your ideas and this "concept of I". You need to see an idea as an object that is not related to you. Don't see it as "your idea", but just as an idea.
It might help to imagine that there is an idea-generation machine in your brain. That machine makes ideas magically appear in your perception as thoughts. Normally when somebody says "Your idea is dumb", you feel hurt. But now we can translate "Your idea is dumb" to "There is idea-generating machinery in my brain. This machinery has produced some output. Somebody says this output is dumb".
Instead of feeling hurt, you can think "Hmm, the idea-generating machinery in my brain produced an idea that this person thinks is bad. Well maybe they don't understand my idea yet, and they criticize their idea of my idea, and not actually my idea. How can I make them understand?" This thought is a lot harder to have while being busy feeling hurt.
Or "Hmm, this person that I think is very competent thinks this idea is bad, and after thinking about it I agree that this idea is bad. Now how can I change the idea-generating machinery in my brain, such that in the future I will have better ideas?" That thought is a lot harder to have when you think that you yourself are the problem. What is that even supposed to mean that you yourself are the problem? This might not be a meaningful statement, but it is the default interpretation when somebody criticizes you.
The basic idea here is, to frame everything without any reference to yourself. It is not me producing a bad plan, but some mechanism that I just happened to observe the output of. In my experience, this not only helps alleviate pain but also makes you think thoughts that are more useful.
Here is what I would do, in the hypothetical scenario, where I have taken over the world.
- Guard against existential risk.
- Make sure that every conscious being I have access to is at least comfortable as the baseline.
- Figure out how to safely self-modify, and become much much much ... much stronger.
- Deconfuse myself about what consciousness is, such that I can do something like 'maximize positive experiences and minimize negative experiences in the universe', without it going horribly wrong. I expect that 'maximize positive experiences, minimize negative experiences in the universe' very roughly points in the right direction, and I don't expect that would change after a long reflection. Or after getting a better understanding of consciousness.
- Optimize hard for what I think is best.
Though this is what I would do in any situation really. It is what I am doing right now. This is what I breathe for, and I won't stop until I am dead.
[EDIT 2023-03-01_17-59: I have recently realized that is is just how one part of my mind feels. The part that feels like me. However, there are tons of other parts in my mind that pull me in different directions. For example, there is one part that wants me to do lots of random improvements to my computer setup, which are fun to do, but probably not worth the effort. I have been ignoring these parts in the past, and I think that their grip on me is stronger because I did not take them into account appropriately in my plans.]
No, but great idea! I'll likely run one. I already ordered some microcristaline cellulose and designed an experimental protocol.
2Glucose monohydrate powder, and then put it in capsules. (Dextrose/D-glucose monohydrate to be extra precise.)
It's possible I have a metabolic disorder that wouldn't be detected by regular blood tests. And yes the amount of glucose is absolutely tiny. I also bought a blood glucose meter. It doesn't show elevated values at all from supplementing glucose. When eating it does increase measurably in line with what is normal. I do have sleep apnea which might do weird stuff, like give you diabetes. I do have a CPAP though maybe there is still some effect from that.
I don't quite understand why it works. But it seems really strong of an effect. Once I increased the amount of MPH I took, then I took 0.6g of glucose, and it suddenly made me feel a pressure in my heart. The effect of the MPH was now too much. Something was throttling the effect of MPH before taking the glucose. And somehow taking the glucose stopped the throttling. This happened in less that 10 minutes. Probably less than 5.
In the past I would have said when ask: "obviously not all drugs are bad" without being pressed. But when it comes to moment to moment decision making I would have subconsciously weight things such that not taking drugs is better. That is the pernicious thing. It's not about what people say when pressed. It's about how they make decisions moment to moment.
It seems that I used moral strictures subconsciously, while my stated position was almost be the opposite of these strictures. And both are---like you said---didn't really make sense.
I still have a strong dislike of mathematics which I acquired by doing the first semester of a German mathematics degree. I think doing that was actively harmful in certain ways. Not sure if it was net negative though. A similar thing happened when studying GOFAI and Chemistry at university.
Each time that I tried to do some accountability buddy thing it completely failed.
The things that actually worked for me is taking methylphenidate, and seriously trying to answer the question of what I think the best thing to do is (in the moment). Once I figure out the thing that I think is actually the best thing to do, it becomes easy to do.
For doing sport I dance to this. That's so fun that it makes me have the problem that I sometimes dance too long.
Also for working I noticed that writing computer programs to understand things better is both really useful and really fun, which makes it easier to work.
The general pattern is to try to make the things that are good for you to do so fun that ideally you just do them by default for their own sake.
Structures of Optimal Understandability
(In this text foundation(s) refers to the OP's definition.)
Something is missing. I think there is another foundation of "Optimal Abstraction Structure for understanding" (simply understandability in the remaining text).
Intuitively, a model of the world can be organized in such a way that it can be understood and reasoned about as efficiently as possible.
Consider a spaghetti codebase with very long functions that do 10 different things each, and have lots of duplication.
Now consider another codebase that performs the same tasks. Probably each function now does one thing, most functions are pure, and there are probably significant changes to the underlying approach. E.g. we might create a boundary between display and business logic.
The point is that for any outward-facing program behavior, there are many codebases that implement it. These codebases can vary wildly in terms of how easy they are to understand.
This generalizes. Any kind of structure, including any type of model of a world, can be represented in multiple. Different representations score differently on how easy the data can be comprehended and reasoned about.
When looking at spaghetti code, it's ugly, but not primarily because of the idiosyncrasies of human aesthetics. I expect there is a true name that can quantify how optimally some data is arranged, for the purpose of understanding and reasoning about it.
Spaghetti code would rank lower than carefully crafted code.
Even a superintelligent programmer still wouldn't "like" spaghetti code when it needs to do a lot of reasoning about the code.
Understandability seems not independent from your three foundations, but…
Mind Structure
"Mind structure" depends directly on task performance. It's about understanding how minds will tend to be structured after they have been trained and have achieved a high score.
But unless the task performance increases when the agent introspects, and the agent is smart enough to do this, I expect mind structures with optimal loss to score poorly on understandability.
Environment Structure
It feels like there are many different models that capture environment structure, which score wildly differently in terms of how easy they are to comprehend.
In particular, in any complex world, we want to create domain-specific models, i.e. heavily simplified models that are valid for a small bounded region of phase space.
E.g. an electrical engineer models a transistor as having a constant voltage. But give too much voltage and it explodes.
Translatability
A model being translatable seems like a much weaker condition than being easily understandable.
Understandability seems to imply translatability. If you have understood something, you have translated it into your own ontology. At least this is a vague intuition I have.
Translatability says: It is possible to translate this.
Optimal understandability says: You can translate this efficiently (and probably there is a single general and efficient translation algorithm).
Closing
It seems there is another foundation of understandability. In some contexts real-world agents prefer having understandable ontologies (which may include their own source code). But this isn't universal, and can even be anti-natural.
Even so understandability seems an extremely important foundation. It might not neccesaily be important to an agent performing a task, but it's important to anyone trying to understand and reason about that agent. Like a human trying to understand if the agent is misaligned.
Stepping back to the meta level (the OP seems a fine), I worry that you fail to utilize LLMs.
"There is are ways in which John could use LLMs that would be useful in significant ways, that he currently isn't using, because he doesn't know how to do it. Worse he doesn't even know these exist."
I am not confident this statement is true, but based on things you say, and based on how useful I find LLMs, I intuit there is a significant chance it is true.
If the statement is true or not doesn't really matter, if the following is true: "John never seriously sat down for 2 hours and really tried to figure out how to utilize LLMs full."
E.g. I expect when you had the problem that the LLM reused symbols randomly you didn't go: "Ok how could I prevent this from happening? Maybe I could create an append only text pad, in which the LLM records all definitions and descriptions of each symbol, and have this text pad be always appended to the prompt. And then I could have the LLM verify that the current response has not violated the pad's contents, and that no duplicate definitions have been added to the pad."
Maybe this would resolve the issue, probably not based on priors. But it seems important to think this kind of thing (and think for longer such that you get multiple ideas, of which one might work, and ideally first focus on trying to build a mechanistic model of why the error is happening in the first place, that allows you to come up with better interventions).
Typst is better than Latex
I started to use Typst. I feel a lot more productive in it. Latex feels like a slug. Typst doesn't feel like it slows me down when typing math, or code. That and the fact that it has an online collaborative editor, and that rendering is very very fast are the most important features. Here are some more:
Here is a comparison of encoding the games of life in logic:
Latex
Typst
Typst in Emacs Org Mode
Here is some elisp to treat latex blocks in emacs org-mode as typst math, when exporting to HTML (renders/embeds as SVG images):
Simply eval this code and then call
org-html-export-to-html-with-typst.