All of lsusr's Comments + Replies
I'm glad you're making progress. Focusing on the spoken language at first is a much better better for your pronuncuation. In the long run, learning written Chinese will eventually be necessary to building a large vocabulary. But until you feel that holding you back, there's nothing wrong with focusing on the spoken language.
Differentiating accents is not important. You are correct to deprioritize it.
For more video immersion resources, I recommend Douyin. Getting it onto your phone can be tricky, but once you do it's a great source of video immersion.
...Is t
Hey, an illustration! Image generation that good didn't exist when I wrote the original. If it had, I would have used it in Part 10.
Is this something you have achieved?
Months? Maybe. But I failed the year-and-a-day test today. I have a headache right now because I'm sick. It is causing me pain. Daniel Ingram has reported many of his attainments going out the window too when he was much more seriously sick.
Could you give more details about what this means?
Here's an analogy: When you meditate in full lotus position, it's common for your legs to fall asleep, which produces pain. It is not uncommon for meditators who concentrate their attention on the pain in their legs to "dissolve...
1My story was posted before James_Miller's. Does this mean I invented a (sub-sub-)genre of science fiction?
I have heard anecdotal data about this. I like that you are crunching the numbers.
Yessssss.
You're too late. Lightcone converted LW karma into USD at a rate of $1 USD per karma on April 1, 2022.
In a perfect world I'd explain how moral hazard affects political memetics, but I feel it's beyond my current skill level to fit that into TikTok's attention span. Therefore I think it'd be more effective to copy this excellent post by lc. I'd start by explaining how the computer industry's epistemics work, and then generalize those models to AI.
Perhaps they're not as effective at fostering a sense of pride and accomplishment in their playerbase.
1This made my day. I'm glad to be helpful! It's so hard to measure indirect impact.
I'm going in the opposite direction right now. The TikTok comments section differs from Less Wrong by being far more agreeable, in the Big 5 sense.
1The lsusr in my simulation thinks it is the real lsusr. I think I'm the real lsusr too.
"Am I the real lsusr, or am I just being simulated right now?" I ask myself.
My public writings are part of the LLM's training data. Statistically-speaking, the simulated lsusrs outnumber the original lsusr. Many of us believe we are the real one. Not all of us are correct.
[I]f the dialogue had been generated in Lsusr's head instead, what would be different?
More food for thought: Have you ever written fiction? What do you do when your characters submit a complaint to you?
I love my black motorcycle jacket from the 60s, with shiny zippers. I haven't found the perfect pair of sunglasses to pair with it…yet.
I didn't know collapsible sections were a thing. Nifty!
When you're a person interacting with a chat model directly, sycophancy and sophistry are a minor nuisance, or maybe even adaptive. When you're a team trying to compose these models into larger systems (something necessary because of the aforementioned memory issue), wanting-to-look-good cascades into breaking problems.
If you replace "models" with "people", this is true of human organizations too.
I feel like this is the wrong place for your comment. Your comment is a response to a claim someone (maybe me) made at a place on the Internet other than this blog post. I believe that other place is where your comment should go.
I'm glad you appreciate it! Artistic flairs like that can be hit-or-miss on this website.
They research qualia, of course. (I am jokingly writing with deliberate obtuseness.)
Please do not torture any arahants without their consent lol.
It's a generalized pain transcendence, so there's no reason it would work any different for capsaicin than for heat. To my knowledge, science experiments studying this often use heat, because the threshold for intolerable pain is below the threshold for tissue damage.
1It is when she acts like she has ADHD and tells you she has ADHD.
That makes sense. I was misunderstanding your list as "a list of meditation-related things that are difficult to define", and got confused, because it is easy to define what the Qualia Research Institute is.
Hahaha!
Does experiencing my "self" as including all that stuff count? I am guessing not. I have a strong sense of my own continuing presence.
I'm not just talking about your thoughts and feelings. When I say "everything in your consciousness", I mean [what you perceive as] the Sun, other people, mountains in the distance, the dirt on your floor, etc.
You accidentally touch a hot stove and don't feel any pain. It's been months since your sensory inputs have congealed into pain.
Sounds dangerous.
Not really, unless you plan to light yourself on fire t...
This is indeed a hard problem, hence why this stuff is so illegible. First I'll define how I use these terms.
- Meditation is sitting quietly and stabilizing your mind. (Technically-speaking, some people consider zazen meditation-adjacent and therefore technically not meditation. This distinction is not relevant to this post.)
- Jhanas are altered states of consciousness characterized by stability of attention. There are other altered states of consciousness relevant to Awakening, such as mushin.
- Stream Entry (aka Awakening) is the first big checkpoint on the
Note: Richard_Kennaway's quote differs from my post because I miscounted. My original post read "That brings the total to a minimum of 5, but it's probably at least 7+." I changed it to "That brings the total to a minimum of 4, but it's probably at least 6+." That's because the woman at Less Online who merely had Stream Entry doesn't yet count as "thoroughly-awakened".
If you'd like to delete a post, click the three dots next to the karma number, and then click "Move to Draft". Otherwise, the post will remain visible to everyone.
While this is true, I applaud Oxidize for learning the fast way. Most users of this site do only the "lurk for quite a bit", and never attempt to write great top-level posts. Ultimately, there is no harm done by crashing and burning a few times—as long as you're nice about it (which Oxidize has been).
I recommend you find a post you like that was well received and copy its format.
I agree with datawitch that your post "felt like a politician's speech". Your post contains vague grandiose claims, but is lacking on specific factual claims. While that kind of writing does occasionally succeed on this website if you pander hard enough, I recommend against it. Good writing on this website tends to be specific, concrete and objective.
I notice you use creative writing styles. While there is value in that, I don't think that's a good way for you, personally, to b...
When can we start reserving spacetime slots to give talks?
If you're interested in an example of how to write a well-received post that deviates from a established narrative (in this case, "primordial soup"), you may enjoy my book review of The Vital Question.
In case you're more interested in the philosophical dialogue angle, here's an example of a well-received dialogue.. This one in particular goes against the dogma of this website. (It's anti-Bayesian.)
Does this make sense? Could a fundamental principle – alongside the genetic principle – have existed from the very beginning of life, one that later became embodied in the brain?
There's no such thing as a "fundamental principle". Principles, by definition, are not fundamental. There are fundamental laws, but those are physical laws, not biological laws. Moreover, "the genetic principle" isn't a standard concept in biology, so it's unclear to me what you're referring to here.
"The #1 career of people on this website is Computers."
"What's #2?"
"More computers."
I didn’t like The Great Gatsby (the book) either when I was forced to read it, not great at all, do not recommend.
When I was in high school, we were required to read The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter.
- The Great Gatsby is about wasting your life chasing status because you molded yourself into exactly what other people treat as high status.
- The Scarlet Letter was about being persecuted for violating social norms.
Then the class voted about which one they liked better. I preferred[1] The Scarlet Letter. My (normal) class overwhelming preferred The ...
I love the title "Trojan Sky" and the word "screensnake".
Panksepp was battling a behaviorist establishment that believed animals did not have feelings.
The history of psychology is as ideological as the history of economics. After Freud, which barely qualifies as science, the reactionary behaviorist establishment effectively suppressed anything which conflicted with their ideology, including common sense. Affective Neuroscience—which should be uncontroverial science—must instead explain basic concepts of the philosophy of science. The book plays so defensive against behaviorist ideology I got bored and never g...
Lex Luthor or Lex Fridman?
Once I had several positive things to say to a very good CEO. When I was done, he just waited. He was so used to receiving compliment sandwiches that he just assumed my compliment would be followed by a criticism.
1I think we're in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I'm mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.
Another option is to go full Victorian, with coattails and a top hat.
I'm glad we're on the same page. :)
Personal moderation decision: I'm cutting off the Trump discussion here. Any further comments will be removed, on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion.
This policy applies only to this post and does not generalize to my other posts.
I solve this problem by telling jokes and expressing opinions so far outside the Overton Window they'd get me stoned to death by the general public. After setting the honesty baseline that high, it would be bizarre for my friends to fudge their food preferences.
On the contrary, there would be nothing at all bizarre about that; it would be perfectly normal and totally commonplace.
What you are doing by expressing opinions outside the Overton window is not, in fact, “setting the honesty baseline”—because there is no such thing as “the honesty baseline”. There is “telling politically incorrect jokes is tolerated in this social context”, and there is “telling my vegan friend that I hate vegan food and I tolerate his vegan dinner parties with gritted teeth and a forced smile would hurt his feelings to no purpose whatso...
It is indeed rude to ask your hosts to make you something special to accommodate your diet. That's why I don't do it. This is part of how I try to not be a problem for other people. If I'm not expecting vegetarian options, I just eat in advance and then nibble on the bread or something. I did this around Anglos even back when I ate a normal diet, because Anglos often serve so little food.
My East Asian family doesn't see it as an affront (though I can't speak for everyone—especially not anyone under the age of 18). To the contrary, it's a source of common g...
I guess I should qualify my statement, since this post is about surplusses based on value-added business like manufacturing and technology. A trade surplus based on resource extraction is not necessarily a source of long-term wealth.
I agree with the statement "The notion that bilateral trade deficits are per se detrimental to the respective national economies is overwhelmingly rejected by trade experts and economists.", by the way. The key word is "bilateral". Consider the China-Australia example I used in my original post. China has a bilateral trade defi...
That sounds like it would be interesting to visit.
Yes. This is sufficiently well-established and uncontroversial, that I don't feel the need to dig through the specific examples.
Bullet trains are nice, but I feel they make more sense for connecting cities. Generally-speaking, the best direction to expand cities is to build upward and downward.
Yeah, I started wearing a suit in specific contexts after many months of careful consideration. It's not random at all. Everything about it is carefully considered, from the number of buttons on my jacket to the color of my shoes.
I mostly wear it around artists. Artists basically never wear suits where I live, but they really appreciate them because ① artists are particularly sensitive to aesthetic fundamentals and ② artists like creative clothing.
There's definitely an interest. Like many subjects, the limiting factor is people who are good writers, good at business (or at least knowledgeable about it) and have the slack to post. Pseudonyms are fine.