All of MakerOfErrors's Comments + Replies

Although, Noesis is just the original Greek Philosophy name for That Magic Click, and not an explanation in and of itself. At least, not any more than the "dark matter" or "phlogiston".

However, it seems like if anyone has figured out what actually is in that magic click, Noesis is the magic search term to find that gem of knowledge in the vast ocean of information. It's a Schelling Point for people to discuss possible answers, so if anyone has found an answer, they or someone learning it from them would introduce it to the discussi... (read more)

Is that really just it?  Is there no special sanity to add, but only ordinary madness to take away?  Where do superclickers come from - are they just born lacking a whole lot of distractions?

What the hell is in that click?

Noesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous

This post has been a core part of how I think about Goodhart's Law. However, when I went to search for it just now, I couldn't find it, because I was using Goodhart's Law as a search term, but it doesn't appear anywhere in the text or in the comments.

So, I thought I'd mention the connection, to make this post easier for my future self and others to find. Also, other forms of this include:

• Campbell's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
• The Cobra effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
• Teaching to the tes

Sorry; normally I try not to make claims like that without a citation, but I was on my phone at the time and couldn't find the source easily. But here it is:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/210112

It's a twin study with 5952 participants. Here's the highlight:

In genetically identical twin pairs, the twin who exercised more did not display fewer anxious and depressive symptoms than the co-twin who exercised less. Longitudinal analyses showed that increases in exercise participation did not predict decreases in anx

I’m sure I’ve made some inexcusable mistakes somewhere in the process of writing this.

Found it. :P (Well, kind of.)

And if exercise has antidepressant effects in humans, then the claim that those effects are neurogenesis-mediated must be wrong too.

Apparently exercise correlates with less depression, but isn't causal. That is, depressed people tend to exercise less, but exercising more doesn't cause you to be less depressed.

Unrelated tangent thought: I'd really like to know if the huge correlation with lifespan/healthspan has the same issue. Like, I'm... (read more)

I'm loving this new Karma system!

Metaculus (a community prediction market for tech/science/transhumanist things) has a similar feature, where comments from people with higher prediction rankings have progressively more golden usernames. The end result is that you can quickly pick out the signal from the noise, and good info floats to the top while misinformation and unbalanced rhetoric sinks.

But, karma is more than just a measure of how useful info is. It's also a measure of social standing. So, while I applaud the effort it took to implement thi... (read more)

Have you seen Richard_Kennaway's comment on the circling thread which compares talking with NVC folks to talking with chatbots?

Went digging, and found it here:

https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aFyWFwGWBsP5DZbHF/circling#cgtM3SRHyFwbzBa56

The "fish sell" link isn't working - it just takes me to the top of the circling post.

Also, when I search for "fish sell" on Lesser Wrong, I get a result under "comments" of CronoDAS saying:

The "fish sell" link isn't working - it just takes me to the top of the Circling post.

And that link, itself, just takes me to the top of the circling post. And weirdly, I don't see that comment here anywhere. Is this a error on the website, rather than the way the link was formatted? Like, is it not possible to link to comments yet? I'll poke around a little, but I'm not all that hopeful, since that's a guess in the dark.

TL;DR: The core concept is this:

<quote>

Your brain already has the ability to update its cognitive strategies (this is called "meta-cognitive reinforcement learning"). However, the usual mechanism works with unnecessary levels of indirection, as in:

• Cognitive strategy -> Thought -> Action -> Reward or punishment
  
• You get rewarded or punished for what you do (as measured by your brain's chemical responses). Good thoughts are more likely to be followed by good actions. Good cognitive strategies are more likely to generate goo
... (read more)

I've been keeping 330 browser tabs open with the intention of getting back to each and every one of them some day. And finally one of those tabs comes in handy! This just proves that I should never close anything.

This is a video explaining the distinctions between cardinals and ordinals. This post may be useful in letting people know that there are different types of infinities, but it does nothing for actually explaining them. There are probably other good resources available online for those who want to know, but this is the only one I've ever seen. (Wikipedia is hopeless here.)

I completely agree with seriousness and aliveness, but think competitiveness is only applicable in extremely narrow, well-defined circumstances like some games, and that these circumstances aren't present in the real world. Sports is an edge case, since the boundaries are artificial, but not as abstract as the rules of, say, chess, and so have real-world gray area which is exploitable.

So I would argue that, most of the time, competitiveness leads to a much, much lower level of play in individuals, not higher. I see several routes to this:

1. Goodhart'

if the government decides to increase the tax on gasoline to "fight Global Warming" this will impact the status of a lot of people.

That's an indirect impact, which I don't think is a plausible motivator. Like, it's a tragedy of the commons, because each individual would be better off letting others jump in to defend their side, and free-riding off their efforts. It may feel like the real reason we jump into demon threads, but I think that's a post-hoc rationalization, because we don't actually feel twice as strong an imp... (read more)

I can easily see people furiously arguing about any of those, I doubt there is much variation between them.

My prediction is that almost no discussion that starts about whether Donald Trump is 1.88m tall should turn into a demon thread, unless someone first changes the topic to something else.

Similarly, the details of climate change itself should start fewer object-level arguments. I would first expect to see a transition to (admitedly closely related) topics like climate change deniers and/or gullible liberals. Sure, people may then pull out the charts and... (read more)

Good point. I dono, maybe almost everything really is about status. But some things seem to have a much stronger influence on status than others, and some are perceived as much larger threats than others, regardless of whether those perceptions are accurate outside of our evolutionary environment.

Even if everything has a nonzero status component, so long as there is variation we'd need a theory to explain the various sources of that variation. I was trying to gesture at situations where the status loss was large (high severity) and would inevitably ha... (read more)

Maybe this is discussed in one of the linked articles (I haven't read them). But interestingly, the following examples of demon topics all have one thing in common:

Latent underlying disagreements about how to think properly... or ideal social norms... or which coalitions should be highest status... or pure, simple you're insulting me and I'm angry…

While it's possible to discuss most things without also making status implications, it's not possible with these issues. Like, even when discussing IQ, race, or gender, it's usually ... (read more)

Note: I wrote most of this, and the sat on it for a couple days. I'm commenting here just to get it out there, because I think the approach is a good one, but I haven't proofread it or tweaked the phrasing to make it clearer. Hopefully I'll come back to it soon, though.

1. If you lived in the time of the Copernican revolution, would you have accepted heliocentrism?

No, absolutely not. I think this is roughly how we should have reasoned:

The best models of physics say that earthly objects are inherently center-seeking. It’s the nature of rocks a

Forgetting arguments but remembering conclusions may be part of this. Same with already being vaccinated against a wide-range of memes. Also, Dunning-Kruger, as we either forget more than we realize but still think we're an expert, or as the state-of-the-art progresses far beyond where it was the last decade we looked. Also, just acquiring more random knowledge makes it easier to offer counterarguments to anything we don't want to change our mind about, or even create fully-general counterarguments.

If "wisdom" really is the result of s... (read more)

Thanks. The Overton Window stuff was mainly about why First Past The Post might be stuck in metaphorical molasses, and I hadn't generalized the concept to other things yet.

Side note: this also gives an interesting glimpse into what it feels like from the inside to have one's conceptual framework become more interconnected. Tools and mental models can exist happily side by side without interacting, even while explicitly wondering about a gap in one's model that could be filled by another tool/model you already know.

It takes some activation en... (read more)

Two things: 1) A medium-sized correction, and 2) a clarification of something that wasn't clear to me at first.

1) The correction (more of an expansion of a model to include a second-order effect) is on this bit:

simplicio:  Ah, I’ve heard of this. It’s called a Keynesian beauty contest, where everyone tries to pick the contestant they expect everyone else to pick. A parable illustrating the massive, pointless circularity of the paper game called the stock market, where there’s no objective except to buy the pieces of paper you’ll think other peopl

Telling people that American politics is so messy as it is because of formal arguments about first-past-the-post voting is similar to explaining that the way highways get build with formal mathematical formulas about traffic density.

Related data:

A couple years ago, there were a bunch of sensational headlines along the lines of "US is an Oligarchy, not a Democracy, New Study Finds". The actual study is an interesting read: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
It correlated the average preferences o... (read more)

Practical, actionable advice ideas:

Seriously, if bookmarking and remembering a tab can change your life expectency by years, that's one hell of a cost/benefit ratio. I'd put absurdly high odds on it being worth picking out a default hospital beforehand, so you don't have to make a split-second decision in an emergency. Like, you just never see low hanging fruit with cost/benefit ratios that high in day-to-day life.

Like, maybe print off the info for a couple choices, and magnet them to the fridge with the closest one on top and the best one u... (read more)

It just occurred to me that your link is likely to be an Incredibly Important(tm) tool for the weird sort of person who might actually be interested in themselves/friends/family not dying during a procedure.

(In opposed to just being interested in signaling how caring we are, or seeking medicine to feel cared for.)

Nice catch!

Googling the term brought me to the Vendor Lock-In Wikipedia page, but no page just for "lock in", even though that's a common term for this sort of thing. However, the "see also" section mentions Path Dependence, which mentions the Bandwagon Effect, which is the perfect term for the Craigslist phenomenon.

These aren't all quite the same thing, but they all seem related. They all highlight different aspects or special cases of similar phenomena.

More generally, could we fight all such problems of this class by claiming to believe in Moloch, as a vengeful god? Then ask for religious exemption from all coordination problems where exemption is legally possible.

Why not organize a religion to spite its god, rather than worship it?

EDIT: The concrete benefits could come from a single commandment to defy Moloch whenever possible. All shoes must be velcro and exempt from dress codes, doctors must be specialists when available, and you can sue for religious discrimination if someone makes hiring decisions ... (read more)

Two things: an expansion on the "employers optimizing for IQ" model, and a defense of regulations as critical tools for *solving* coordination problems.

suppose that there’s a magical tower that only people with IQs of at least 100 and some amount of conscientiousness can enter, and this magical tower slices four years off your lifespan. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to prefer prospective employees who have proved they can enter the tower.

I think most companies are sufficiently broken that they aren't even capab... (read more)