All of lillybaeum's Comments + Replies
I wonder how domination and submission relate to these concepts.
Note that d/s doesn't necessarily need to have a sexual connotation, although it nearly always does.
My understanding of the appeal of submission is that the ideal submissive state is one where the dominant partner is anticipating the needs and desires of the submissive partner, supplies these needs and desires, and reassures or otherwise convinces the submissive that they are capable of doing so, and will actively do so for the duration of the scene.
After reading your series, I'd assume what i...
To be clear, you're basically saying that vitalistic force is what makes things appear to be 'animate', and when we associate vitalistic force with others, they feel to be alive, and when we associate vitalistic force with 'me, myself, my actions, my personality, my thoughts' etc... we get the homunculus, which is... a conceptual entity, possessing no more special vitalistic force ('free will', and other synonyms) than a cartoon character or a character in the Sims?
We're just observing, through awareness, our brain, and the brain we're observing is making ...
Really loving this series. It's clicking together lots of things in a way I wasn't able to do on my own, and neither was AI despite me feeding it all my disparate thoughts and questions about awareness, tulpa, DID, nirodha samapatti, etc... and this series is just getting into this stuff and doing a wonderful job of explaining and solidifying these concepts.
As soon as I read that last sentence about people being able to perceive awareness as not being within the mind, I feel like it unlocked something in terms of my ability to get closer to awakening in a really palpable way.
We run a large number of simulations of societies on the verge of building AGI. Using our vast resources and our superintelligent AI friends, we build so convincing simulations that a young AGI that is just smart enough to take over the world, but didn't have time yet to build Jupiter-brained successors, can't distinguish the simulation from reality.
maybe we are in one of those!! whoa!!
This seems to be what Jimmy Apples on Twitter is implying, that people should go out and "wash their balls in the water at Waikiki Beach" between now and AGI in 2027.
The following is text from Claude Opus 3. I generally find people just dumping answers from LLMs to be kind of cringe, but in this case, as I was using it to try to understand the post and your comments better, I came across some really genuinely insightful-feeling stuff and felt as though Claude's input might be helpful to you in some way, and that it would be remiss not to share it. I'm sorry if it's nonsensical, I'm not informed enough on the topic to know.
"Regarding the relationship between belief states and "features", I think there are a few importan...
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1How do you feel about Bayeslord's description of Jhana meditation being a positive form of prediction error, creating a sort of feedback loop of bliss?
Now this is effective altruism.
1I've seen some convincing arguments that water is not wet.
This isn't related to the post directly, but do you think that public transportation being free would be a good or bad decision for any reasonably large city (Chicago, Boston, New York, etc)?
Good meaning 'good for people, good for the city's local economy generally (via other benefits besides income from fares)'
This is a weird and stupid question, but did you used to be an admin on Hellmoo?
It's really interesting to hear that people go this far in this regard. I had thought maybe I was overthinking it, but it seems like some people like yourself find a lot of value in cataloguing these things beyond just bookmarking them on the site or vaguely remembering the concepts and searching when they need them.
This is really interesting and useful.
Particularly, the two things you linked are just interesting on their own, but also although I don't think my brain works in the same way yours does, I appreciate your perspective and how you tend to work with regards to these things. I think that I need something like a reference or a bookmark because these concepts don't stick quite as strongly in my mind without lots of repeated exposure. I tend to be a 'ground-up' learner (if that's even a thing) as opposed to someone who can keep lots of disparate concepts separat...
I think you might be right. For example, any of the logo changes I described is going to necessarily be related to making the company more attractive to investors by seeming more 'modern', and a lot of these changes are probably not simply decided upon by the designers themselves, but are also incentivized and meddled with by higher-ups who want things to look more like another, more popular and profitable app.
I assume you live in the US or Canada. The fact that you feel the need to give the 9-year-old a kid license (the tile is smart!) I think points to societal issues to do with norms and structure that lead to the sort of effects described in the OP.
US and Canadian cities (and much of Europe and the developing world that designed their cities by the West's example) are generally not designed in a way that is friendly towards kids exploring and existing in the world safely.
I don't mean 'safely' as in 'they might fall down and scrape their knee or get lost', I ...
Haven't read your entire post yet but agree broadly with the idea. Unsure of your methodology but I think knowledge has to be built from the ground-up. Lack of understanding leads to frustration. Upvote systems encourage that difficult concepts must not simply be described but also taught/explained thoroughly rather than just 'pointed at'.
For example, I can understand on some level if someone tries to explain to me why object oriented design patterns in programming are inferior to procedural, but if I've never made programs with either methodology, I will ...
You may want to look into Toki Pona, a language ostensibly built around conveying meaning in the fewest, simplest possible expressions.
One can explain the most complex things despite having only 130~ words, almost like 'programming' the meaning into the sentence, but as the sentence necessarily gets longer and longer, one begins to wonder the necessity of encoding so much meaning.
You can only point to the Tao, you can't describe it or name it directly. Information is much the same way, I think.
I was listening to a podcast the other day Lex Friedman interviewing Michael Littman and Charles Isbell, and Charles told an interesting anecdote.
He was asked to teach an 'introduction to CS' class as a favor to someone, and he found himself thinking, "how am I going to fill an hour and a half of time going over just variables, or just 'for' loops?" and every time he would realize an hour and a half wasn't enough time to go over those 'basic' concepts in detail.
He goes on to say that programming is reading a variable, writing a variable, and conditional br...
Thank you! That's very kind of you to say. I haven't spent a lot of time 'assimilating into LessWrong' so I sometimes worry that I come off as ignorant or uninformed when I post, it's nice to hear that you think I made some sense.
Regarding 'shower thoughts' and 'distraction-removal' as far as its' relation to cell phones and youtube videos and other 'super fun' activities as one might call them, I definitely think that there's something there.
I've long had the thought that 'shower thoughts' are simply one of the rare times in a post-2015ish world that people actually have the opportunity to be bored. Being bored is important. It makes you pursue things other than endless youtube videos, video games, porn, etc. As well, showering and washing dishes and other 'boring' activities are ...
I recently wrote a Question about learning that lacked a lot of polish but poked at a few of the ideas discussed here. I haven't had time just now to read the entire post but I plan to come back to it and comb through it to try to shore up the ideas I have about learning right now. I'm also reading Ultralearning which is interesting although a little popsci. I find all this stuff really interesting because I've been having a lot of trouble learning things lately, feeling like my brain just isn't working like it used to since I got covid. I've tried program...
Do you want to elaborate on that?
I've been trying to learn how to play Super Smash Bros. Melee, lately.
Melee is a game that was accidentally created in such a way that has led to an enormous amount of competitive depth and room for improvement.
I'm in a somewhat unique position because I played it a bit as a kid but unlike a very large portion of the community, I know very little about the metagame, the movement tech, the lingo, what's considered good or bad, etc.
The majority of the community, it seems, has either played for years already, or has watched the competitive scene for years alr...
The same reason a sane person might want to meditate.
Funny enough, I meant aphasia. I only experienced anosmia temporarily at the height of my infection and mixed up the two words when writing my comment. Anything involving words generally is just harder these days.
This is anecdotal, but I have suffered clear and significant issues with aggression/annoyance and anosmia since my COVID infection, so I appreciate any research into long COVID. It's really scary to feel like I have to grasp to reach words before even my thirties.
I think this has changed my mind towards believing that OpenAI is maybe not going about things all wrong with their methodology of RLHF.
Do I think that RLHF and their other current alignment techniques will ultimately, 100% prevent GPT from creating a mask that has a secret agenda to actually take over the world? No. I don't think this methodology can COMPLETELY prevent that behavior, if a prompt was sophisticated enough to create a mask that had that goal.
But the concept, in concept, makes sense. If we think of 'token prediction' as the most basic functio...
I really strongly recommend that anyone interested particularly in journaling using AI does not use anything that sends that data to a server somewhere. Use llama or another local model if you possibly can. It may be less capable but it's far more responsible to do so. Personally I find a lot of value in AI journaling, but it also made me glimpse the future possibilities of what unscrupulous companies could do with a detailed log of every day of your life for years. I mean, isn't that basically the most useful user data you could possibly have for advertis...
I previously have had no experience with IFS, Focusing or Felt sense, but it seems to absolutely click with my worldview and thoughts I've been having about the mind and the self for a long time. Still reading through several LW articles about it, but it gave me an idea. I have a creative project that I have a general 'vibe' for what I want it to be, but have no idea what I actually want out of it. So, aiming as much as possible to simply point as much at 'the feeling' or 'felt sense' it had in my mind, I wrote/dictated a few paragraphs of text about the w...
I think it was meant in good humor, but it did feel a little on the nose.
And following up on this, "Socrateses" is probably wrong. 😅
In Modern Greek, the plural would be Socratides (Σωκράτηδες; the primary stress is on a) or Socrates (Σωκράτες; way less commonly used). With a 2-min search I found this ref to make the case for Socratides.
[And since I happen to have an Ancient Greek language teacher in the next room, by asking her, she gave the following reference]
In Ancient Greek, it would be Σωκράται. If you look at section "133. α" here you can find its conjugation in the example. This would be translated to either...
I really like this. I think that some people could claim that you're being too far-reaching here, but I don't think so.
I think this post brought up some interesting discussion and I'm glad I made it. Not sure if it's 'best of 2023' material but I liked the comments/responses quite a bit and found them enlightening.