All of LeBleu's Comments + Replies

LeBleu10

Is that table representative of the data? If so, it is a very poor dataset. Most of those questions look very in-group, to which it is accurately forecasting 0.5, since anyone outside that bubble has no idea of the answer.

I wonder how different it is if you filter out every question with a first person pronoun, or that mentions anyone who was not Wikipedia-notable as of the cut off date.

Perhaps it does well in politics and sports because those are the only categories about general knowledge that have a decent number of questions to evaluate. (Per the y-sca... (read more)

LeBleu3-3

I'm confused why you don't expect some other Republican candidate to do it. Have you not paid attention to Gov. DeSantis's actions in Florida? https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2023/05/05/commentary-is-ron-desantis-fascist/

I'm not familiar with Nikki Haley, but this article seems to indicate she is at least far right: https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2023/02/nikki-haley-is-extremist-moderates-clothing-donald-trump

Mike Pence risked his life to oppose Trump's January 6th coup attempt, so even though he is an Christian evangelical Dominionist, a... (read more)

RobertM115

Because there's a big difference between "has unsavory political stances" and "will actively and successfully optimize for turning the US into a fascist dictatorship", such that "far right or fascist" is very misleading as a descriptor.

4ChristianKl
There are reasons why Trump couldn't do a successful coup even if he wanted to. He didn't have the loyalty. It seems that Trump's strategy to get more loyalty for the next time was to use claims that the election was stolen as a loyalty test. The other candidates are just going to hire the traditional Republican establishment in a similar way that Trump did in his first term. 

FWIW I'm not convinced by the article on Haley, having bad conservative policies != being an anti-democratic nut job who wants to rig elections and put all your opponents in jail. She's super unlikely to win, though.

LeBleu10

I only read up to remark 5.B before I got too distracted that remark 1 does not describe the GPT I interact with.

How did you come to the conclusion that the token deletion rule is to remove 1 token from the front?

The API exposed by OpenAI does not delete any tokens. If you exceed the context window, you receive an error and you are responsible for how to delete tokens to get back within it. (I believe, if I understand correctly, this is dynamic GPT, calculating one token at a time, but only appending to the end of the input tokens until it reaches a stop t... (read more)

LeBleu30

I think your supposition that most people have trouble critiquing arguments they're encountering for the first time is incorrect. I don't find this hard myself. Learning how to critique arguments is a skill you can study. Even just googling "how to critique an argument you've never seen before" gives some reasonable starting points. I'm not surprised a background in Evangelical Christianity has left you lacking this skill, as unquestioning belief is favored there.

Seeking out and listening to podcasts from several distinct but not obviously incorrect philos

... (read more)
3wolverdude
Thanks for the tips! I suppose that large portions of The Sequences are devoted to precisely the task of critiquing arguments without requiring a contrary position. It's kind of an extension of a logical syntax check, but the question isn't just whether it's complete and deductively sound, but also whether it's empirically sound and bayesianly sound. It's gonna take me a while to master those techniques, but it's a worthy goal. Not 100% sure I can do it on the timeline I need, but I can at least practice and start developing the habits. I love reading about failure modes! Not sure why I find it so fascinating. Maybe it's connected to the perfectionism? Speaking of... I consider my greatest failure in life to be that I haven't failed enough. I have too few experiences of what works and what doesn't, I failed to make critical course-corrections because they lay outside my info bubble, and I missed out on many positive life experiences along with the negative ones.
LeBleu00

Most programming is not about writing the code, it is about translating a human description of the problem into a computer description of the problem. This is also why all attempts so far to make a system so simple "non-programmers" can program it have failed. The difficult aptitude for programming is the ability to think abstractly and systematically, and recognize what parts of a human description of the problem need to be translated into code, and what unspoken parts also need to be translated into code.

LeBleu10

The article noted it was high frequency stimulus that had the effect, and seemed to be disrupting normal function.

The article also says the patient was awake.

LeBleu10

Good article, I'll have to see if reminding myself of this helps at work tomorrow.

Success and happiness cause you to regain willpower;

This is dangerously incorrect - studies show willpower is only an expendable resource for people who believe it to be. People who don't think willpower is expendable have longer lasting willpower.

01gn1t0r
Indeed willpower is not a expendable resource. Neither success and hapiness nor resting will regain willpower (unless you believe it to be so). Need a study break to refresh? Maybe not, say Stanford researchers The link to the paper is in the article
4Dreaded_Anomaly
I think you might be assuming causation from correlation. It seems like one could argue just as well that people who inherently have longer lasting willpower are less likely to view it as an expendable resource.
LeBleu10

I feel like the question there is "Does the map match the territory?"

If atoms are real, then there is something in the territory to which the symbol atom on our map refers.

I'm tempted to say that if an atom is real, then any sufficiently accurate model must include something that refers to them. However, wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that no, atoms do not exist, we were mistaken? Really quantum wave functions exist, and an atom is just a shorthand for referring to a particular type of collection of electron, quark, and gluon wave function... (read more)

LeBleu10

What's the usefulness of "I think that everything exists, by the way: there's an ensemble universe"? How does it constrain your expectations?

I don't see how having specific beliefs either way about stuff outside the observable universe is useful.

Now, if you can show that whether the universe beyond the observable is infinite or non-infinite but much larger than the Hubble Volume constrains expectations about the contents of the observable universe, then it might be useful.

3Will_Newsome
Off the top of my head: If the world is very big then there are more agents to trade with or be simulated by. Also I'm not sure what counts as the observable universe -- we can't see beyond the Hubble volume with our telescopes, but we can probabilistically model what different parts of the universe or different universes look like nonetheless. We also do not know what is ultimately observable. We currently lack the ability to observe mental phenomena but I still have specific beliefs about roughly what we'll observe when we really understand consciousness. It is useful to be curious about mysteries to which you believe there to be no answer; beliefs like that often turn out to be wrong.
LeBleu20

Clarification: if you walk into the leather shop, with $300 burning a hole in your pocket, and see a nice jacket - and the guy behind the counter knows what he's doing (and gives enough of a shit) you will walk out of their, happy with your new jacket.

Are you assuming you walked into the leather shop with the intention to buy something? Or does walking in with a friend/partner who is shopping there count, but you wanted to spend that money on something else?

Saying there's no defense whatsoever was a bit of an exagerration; it's true that some people a

... (read more)
1khafra
To address both these points, "[amount of money] burning a hole in your pocket" is a colloquial phrase which indicates an intent to spend the money.
LeBleu30

Your attempt to understand these people's motivations seems to assume that these people understand that you don't know the answer. Another possible motivation is that they think the explanation is obvious or common knowledge, and hence you must be asking to antagonize them, not out of actual ignorance. Not to say that I don't think some people's motivation really is the one you've stated - they simply enjoy being in control of people.

4SilasBarta
If you're talking about my complaints about the forum, that's not the case. One time, numerous people asked for clarification from this person about which kinds of behavior that person was asking others to stop, so the person clearly knew it was an issue that the others didn't know exactly which behavior was being criticized. That person eventually resorted to, "I'll tell you when I don't like it, as will a few people I've selected." 18 months later, he/she agreed his/her preferences were not typical. I will provide the documentation privately if you wish, but I have no desire to start this publicly.
LeBleu20

If you simply remove the negative, this focus shift tends to happen automatically.

I don't understand what you mean by removing the negative, and how this is supposed to be a simple act. Obviously it is too late to stop the original pain that triggered it. If you mean removing the negative reaction, I don't understand how you can claim that is a simple action. (Unless you are constraining simple to mean simple for an expert in the particular field of mind modification/psychology/whatever the relevant field is.)

8pjeby
Memory reconsolidation and reinterpretation is a simple act - we do it all the time. Suppose that there's an attractive person of the appropriate sex who looks away and avoids you every time you come in the room. You feel hurt and rejected - a negative reaction. Then, you find out that it's really because he/she is attracted to you and too shy to say anything. Your feelings about the matter change immediately. Doing this for an arbitrary negative reaction is equally simple, at least in principle.
LeBleu20

You are the one who introduced correctness into the argument. Alicorn said:

Do you expect anyone to benefit from your expertise if you can't convince them you have it?

Feel free to read this as 'convince them your expertise is "useful" ' rather than your assumed 'convince them your expertise is "correct" '.

The underlying point is that there is a very large amount of apparently useless advice out there, and many self-help techniques seem initially useful but then stop being useful. (as you are well aware since your theory claims to ex... (read more)

4pjeby
Actually, I'm also running into a bias that merely because I have things to sell, I'm therefore trying to sell something in all places at all times... or that I'm always trying to "convince" people of something. Indeed, the fact that you (and others) seem to think I need or even want to "convince" people of things is a symptom of this. Nobody goes around insisting that say, Yvain needs to get some high-status people to validate his ideas and "convince" the "community" to accept them! If I had it all to do over again, I think I would have joined under a pseudonym and never let on I even had a business.
2CronoDAS
Indeed, that would be fun. (I read Brin's blog, too!)
LeBleu00

Algoma, WI (about 4 hours north of Chicago)

LeBleu00

When re-working this into a book, you need to double check your conversions of log odds into decibels. By definition, decibels are calculated using log base 10, but some of your odds are natural logarithms, which confused the heck out of me when reading those paragraphs.

Probability .0001 = -40 decibels (This is the only correct one in this post, all "decibel" figures afterwards are listed as 10 * the natural logarithm of the odds.) Probability 0.502 = 0.035 decibels Probability 0.503 = 0.052 decibels Probability 0.9999 = 40 decibels Probability 0.99999 = 50 decibels

P.S. It'd be nice if you provided an RSS feed for the comments on a post, in addition to the RSS feed for the posts...