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All of Josephine's Comments + Replies

Josephine's Shortform
Josephine10

Thanks for listening to them! I have mixed feelings about most of what I make, but I think those songs are alright. My approach to making music does tend to strike a lot of different chords in a small space, but it's more that I just feel like writing in one or two tones doesn't really fit the ideas I have - most of my songs start as a list of concepts, and I rarely have an album's worth of concepts that all fit together in the way other albums do. 

A lot of those effects are just baked into the beats, which I had to use because I was scouring the Free... (read more)

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3Viliam
Oh, the landscape in ink is wonderful, too! (Though not good for exercise, which is what I use the other songs for.)
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine30

From what I remember, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids contains only a very short mention of how to inspire good behavior in children - essentially the advice to punish consistently, especially including funny or endearing offenses. The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that discipline itself is the practice of training the same response to an increasing range of stimuli. 

Progress in Vipassana, and in meditation in general, comes from engaging with fewer and fewer distractions. Progress in habits comes from decreasing the number of tim... (read more)

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4Gunnar_Zarncke
Consistency is a core part. The trick is to know when to make exceptions (and I don't think I have figured that out fully yet). Exceptions for legit excuses but also for novel circumstances. Too much consistency also doesn't prepare kids for real life either. It also depends on how many and how complex rules you have to begin with. Other aspects include the approach to differences in approach between parents and between other relevant households (e.g. godparents').
garbageactual's Shortform
Josephine10

This is (one of the versions of) Niven's Law. 

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Josephine's Shortform
Josephine110

I've been writing things in one form or another for about 13 years, and I've passed the first "million bad words" every writer's said to have. I've also released around 200 rap songs under different names, which tends to come off lower-status but is no less dear to me. (I would consider 500-1000 songs to be the equivalent "bad" cutoff, though.) Since these are the things I've spent the longest time learning and practicing, I want to see if I can apply anything in them to learning and practicing in general. Here are my thoughts so far:

  • Every art is really se
... (read more)
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2Viliam
I just listened to your "Jake the Adversary" albums. I really liked these songs: Misbegotten, H E L L O _ W O R L D, Failure Mode, Zeitnot, Thanateros. Seems to me that you put quite differently sounding songs in the same album; was it on purpose? (Do you think it makes sense from the business perspective?) A technical note: you seem to play with various sound effects, and sometimes it is awesome, like the ticking sound in Zeitnot, and sometimes it is annoying, like the "instant message" sound in Waystation (I would otherwise like the song, but that sound just triggers me), or the cracking sound in 960,000.
4matto
I'm impressed by how accurately this describes learning complex skills. I'm practicing writing and I feel the same way most of the points describe: as if I'm exploring a system of caves without a map, finding bits and pieces of other explorers (sometimes even meeting them), but it's all walking a complicated, 3d structure and constantly bumping into unknown unknowns. Let me illustrate it this way: about 3 years ago, when I started on this journey, I thought I would read 1-2 books about writing and I'll be good. Now, I'm standing in sub-cave system #416, taking a hard look at "creativity"/"new ideas" and chuckling at my younger self who thought that sub-cave system #18 "good sentences" will lead him to the exit. And even though I haven't practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since the pandemic began, I see a lot of similarities there. At first, I thought I just have to practice a move. Then I noticed that there are many small variations depending on my energy level, the opponents size and weight, etc. Then I noticed that I could fake moves to lure my opponent into making mistakes, but I should avoid mistakes myself. Then I noticed that my opponents were better in at some moves than others. Then I noticed that my own build gave me certain advantages and disadvantages. Then I noticed... At the end, just before the lockdowns, I learned a lot about humility and began to discard all the "factual knowledge" I got from youtube videos or books and instead began focusing on sets of small details to explore how they worked in different situations. Then, just practiced it over and over until I saw "the thing".
6Viliam
Sounds correct. I was thinking how this applies to computer games: Several subskills - technical perfection, new idea, interesting story, graphics, music... Different games become popular for different aspects (Tetris vs Mass Effect vs Cookie Clicker). A frequent beginner mistake is making a game with multiple levels which feel like copies of each other. That's because you code e.g. five or ten different interactive elements, and then you use all of them in every level. It makes the first level needlessly difficult, and every following level boring. Instead, you should introduce them gradually, so each level contains a little surprise, and perhaps you should never use all of them in the same level, but always use different subsets, so each level has a different flavor instead of merely being more difficult. Another beginner mistake is to focus on the algorithm and ignore the non-functional aspects. If one level has a sunset in background, and another level uses a night sky with moon, it makes the game nicer, even if the background does not change anything about functionality. Yet another mistake is to make the game insanely difficult, because as a developer you know everything about it and you played the first level for hundred times, so even the insanely difficult feels easy to you. If most new players cannot complete the tutorial, your audience is effectively just you alone. Some people may be successful and yet you don't want to be like them, e.g. because they optimize the product to be addictive, while you aim for a different type of experience; or their approach is "explore the market, and make a clone of whatever sells best", while you have a specific vision. You should do a very simple game first, because you are probably never going to finish a complicated one if it's your first attempt. I know a few people who ignored this advice, spent a lot of time designing something complex, in one case even rented a studio... but never finished anything. (Epistem
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine30

Failure to apply a lesson is usually failure to register its relevance to your life. Don't look for the moments where you try and retry but your effort doesn't bear fruit, look for gaps between what you learn/know and your world-model.

This is one reason to make beliefs pay rent in expectations, and to ensure that all the nodes in your model of the world are hooked up to something. The go-to example of this being Feynman's story of students who understood the math of refraction indices but not that water was a refraction index, leaving them unable to use wh... (read more)

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Josephine's Shortform
Josephine50

Related to half-assing things with all you've got, I've noticed that there's often a limit to how much you can succeed at a given task. If you write a paper for a class worth an A+ it's certainly still possible to improve the paper, just not in the context of the course.

The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa once put this as "You will never be decorated by your guru." In the presence of a master, your development of your art will never blow their mind and leave them deeply impressed - and if it did, it would only be a signal that you're in need of a differen... (read more)

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3Dagon
Good observation!  The converse holds too - we should change context for those things we want to do better than the current mechanisms can measure.
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine30

I have yet to meet the opinion in the wild that the humanities are better or more worthy of study than STEM, and I'm skeptical that a degree in, say, entomology has anything like the market of a science like physics. (That said, from some cursory checks I'm surprised at the level to which a non-applied math degree seems to affect one's career, although I'm suspicious that the STEM label lets it get lumped in during analyses with potentially higher earners like statistics, physics and engineering.) And my courses were largely on subjects like web design, ru... (read more)

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A conversation about cooking, science, and creativity
Josephine30

I've done scientific research not at all, but I've been cooking for friends and roommates for about six years. Last night I had a lot of bagels I wasn't going to eat, so I tore them into small pieces, soaked them in an egg mixture and baked them into a French toast casserole. It's not a recipe I've ever made before, but I did know for instance that the amount of milk in the egg mixture wasn't actually very important. I think part of this is that I've made French toast many times; the simpler the recipe, the more it can be iterated.

In contrast, one roommate... (read more)

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3DirectedEvolution
Several years ago, I helped a family friend, who's an excellent cook, prepare a Bûche de Noël. One of the small but powerful pieces of advice she gave me that evening was "we don't need to be tedious." There's definitely the equivalent of "bread recipes" in scientific research. The lab I'm joining this fall is doing spinal cord injury research, and the PI is setting me up on what he calls "turn-the-crank research." It uses a preclinical test they've done many times before, using a small but meaningful improvement in the intervention. It doesn't require too much creativity or expert knowledge, just a lot of diligence and reasonable planning skills.
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine190

I'm skeptical that reading LessWrong helps; I had the Sequences and HPMOR under my belt well before I graduated. I also received the advice that I should take something like a business degree, though maybe not often or forcefully enough to sink in. If someone had taken me to one side, shook me by the shoulders and told me in no uncertain terms the difficulties I'd have, I want to think I'd have chosen differently. 

I think cynicism often assumes an unreasonable level of hindsight, though. If we were in another branch of the multiverse where I'm an assi... (read more)

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2Gunnar_Zarncke
Reading this it seems your question was more about the second part of failing: When plan B (or C, or D) fail. Or how to reduce the likelihood that they do - or to have more realistic expectations about that. I was once running out of options and falling back to plan C and D on a big life topic. It was related to joblessness. A previously existing plan B for such a situation had become unavailable for other reasons (also big ones but that did work out). I scrambled and got a good job offer and started to relax but they postponed the signing for weeks and weeks - while promising it would go thru. It worked out well but there was a point where I resigned and accepted a much lower economic level. Not too bad as Germany has a good safety net. The level of the safety net depends very much on the country of course but the general pattern seems to be that few people will worry about other people's economic mishap. Many more ways lead down than up and you are left in the dark which ways lead to the good places.
4Viliam
I think the society tells a lot of lies, or at least often lies by omission, and it is difficult to correct these lies, because they exist for a reason -- there is some social mechanism that rewards the liars and punishes the truthtellers, for example by raising the status of the liars and lowering the status of the truthtellers. If anyone asked me about education choice to maximize the chance of getting the job, STEM is the obvious answer. (Although it depends on who asks; some people do not have the necessary skills/traits. I don't know what would be the right answer for them.) But if I gave such advice in public, I can easily imagine the backlash. Humanities are high-status, STEM is... let's say medium-status because it is associated with nerds but also with money... definitely lower-status than humanities. The proper way to express it is that STEM makes people merely smart, but humanities make them wise. (Wise = something like smart, but mysterious and higher-status.) Recommending STEM feels like an attempt to give nerds high status, and invites an angry response. Which is the reason why you haven't heard such advice more often and more strongly (in general, not just on LessWrong). Problem is that the advice "study humanities, not STEM" is actually correct for a small part of the society; namely for the rich people. If you have so much wealth and connections that you will never need a job to pay your bills, but you still want to study something, because for some weird reason having a university education is considered higher-status than not having one... then humanities are definitely the right choice. You want to know something that other people at least partially understand, so that you can impress them with some smart quotations; you don't want the inferential distance to be too large. Also, if you study something that makes it quite difficult to get a job, that's good counter-signaling! As a rich person, you don't want to be suspected for someone who might
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine180

Consider these two cases:

  • A university graduate on a job hunt just can't find something that matches his skills. People never get back to him, interviews go nowhere, pretty opportunities peter out. Attempt after attempt leaves him frustrated and empty-handed, and as his motivation thins or his desperation thickens, he finally decides that he needs something and applies for a job he's massively overqualified for, maybe an entry-level position in a supermarket. Then, to his horror, that job rejects him. 
  • A woman trying to pay her bills runs into complicat
... (read more)
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4Gunnar_Zarncke
Society would need to be different overall. Everybody is told that things and skills are more valuable than they actually are. If somebody believes this - as most people are inclined naturally - they will naturally fall into the traps you describe. Like you say cynism helps or growing up in a family that has overall more realistic views, or having other key persons (e.g. teachers) that help calibrate this right. Reading LessWrong probably also helps.  
Josephine's Shortform
Josephine120

I've noticed two points in recent life where I've fallen prey to Goodhart's law, and I'm working to improve them. 

1) On my birthday a few days ago I finally dropped a goal I had for this year, to read as many books as possible. (My main strategy for this was to tell people how many books I'd read and maintain a list on Goodreads whenever I finished one.) For the last three years I've tried to measure books per year as a way to gauge how much I was learning, but as I improved and the number increased the differences between "reading lots of books" and ... (read more)

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Randomized Zettelkasten Test
Josephine30

That's a wonderful name!

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Randomized Zettelkasten Test
Josephine40

It certainly took an interesting intellect to develop a system like the Zettelkasten, though I'm not sure to what extent Luhmann credited the invention with his prolific success vs. having it attributed later as advertising hype. I would of course love to ape his success as a thinker, although I think another factor in that might be that my interests are spread further out, while his seemed to cluster around the social science he liked to write in. 

And I'm not sure brainstorming is the right concept. I might brainstorm the solution to a specific probl... (read more)

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4DirectedEvolution
That's an interesting perspective. I would normally lump both those purposes (concrete problem-solving vs. playful solution-imagining) under the heading "brainstorming," but they really are quite different mental maneuvers. Since life forces concrete problem-solving upon us, it might be particularly valuable to name playful solution-imagining in order to highlight it as a thing you can do. If concrete problem-solving is "brainstorming," maybe this is "brainsplashing?"
Randomized Zettelkasten Test
Josephine30

I cut down the number of nodes because I felt like the project would be too tedious at scale, and having a handful of very fruitful nodes would make it harder to show if the rest of them weren't doing anything. 

I'm not sure I would say the method's lost its novelty for me, since it's more of an afterthought to note-taking usually, but I've found it unrewarding to look at this web of concepts swimming together and not get any eurekas out of it. It's possible that cutting the chaff out might produce a tighter web that makes more meaningful connections, ... (read more)

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