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All of Max Hodges's Comments + Replies

Question on GPT-3 Excel Demo
Answer by Max Hodges*30

The datasets it was trained on include Wikipedia (English), Common Web Crawl (basically a subset of the Internet), Github, among others.

A team of researchers from OpenAI recently published a paper describing GPT-3, a deep-learning model for natural-language with 175 billion parameters, 100x more than the previous version, GPT-2. The model is pre-trained on nearly half a trillion words and achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks without fine-tuning.

In paper published on arXiv, a team of over 30 co-authors described the model and seve... (read more)

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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges*-20
...provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide

What makes you call meditation a religious program?

Where is the religion in this practice:

Practice: Mindfulness of Breathing

  1. Find a quiet place, and sit on either a chair or cushion. Choose a chair with a firm, flat seat, and hold your back upright (although not stiffly so). Let the soles of your feet meet the ground, and bring your hands on to your lap. If you sit on a cushion, you can be cross-legged. Let your body be untensed, inviting openness and confidence.
  2. Decide how long to pr
... (read more)
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2[anonymous]
Yes, studies with good methodologies and decent sample sizes would make me question my stance. If they were replicated, that would completely change my mind. As I mentioned in my other comments, I have arrived at my present beliefs by doing a literature review few years ago. I'm a bit more sceptical about meta-analyses since a lot of papers published on the subject are of terribly low quality (or at least were, when I looked into it).
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges00
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that.

I thought that was probably not a choice for most people. Perhaps a result of society getting so obese that no one finds each other attractive anymore? For me, it's like the difference between riding (preferably racing) a motorcycle vs playing a motorcycle video game. I can't imagine why anyone who has experienced the former would prefer the latter.

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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges00

The OP conceded my points were valid btw, but thanks for weighing in with your profound personal insights!

> I believe this is mostly a waste of time.

oh well!

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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges-40

>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are - for good reason - skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.

if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).

A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the ty... (read more)

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4Kaj_Sotala
"My" model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant "the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together". I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene's work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series. (I liked Dennett's book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly - he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn't experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I'd first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)
Max Hodges10

> If you're planning on spending two months improving the revenue created by feature X by 3%, do the napkin math to see if existing revenue coming from X justifies two months salary.

How do you know they didn't? That deck is just a summary of years of work. Perhaps reach out to Dan McKinley for further discussion. I'm afraid we've both just making a lot of speculation at this point. Talk to Dan.

When your revenue is 7-8 digits, 3% can add up! Sometimes it's such a no-brainer that it's not worth opening Excel over. Last week ... (read more)

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A game designed to beat AI?
Max Hodges10

Thanks! Was there any requirement that it needed to be a physical set? I assumed the AI would probably be interested in a digital environment.

The set could have a bunch of "cards" to start; or maybe the whole thing is open-sourced if you're philosophically opposed to the idea of people making their own decisions about trading money for things they find valuable. But those issues seem rather secondary to the spirit of the challenge here.

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1Long try
No, I'm not against that trading money for valuable stuffs part. And while the game can be digital, it does not hurt to have some physical sets for the human elements.
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10

I'm not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.

Here's a nice comparison on Quora from someone "Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001"

Zen is a school of "sudden enlightenment". You "just sit" on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly "get" it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and craz... (read more)

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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10

Have you looked at the work of Sara Lazer PhD?

We study the impact of yoga and meditation on various cognitive and behavioral functions. Our results suggest that meditation can produce experience-based structural alterations in the brain. We also found evidence that meditation may slow down the age related atrophy of certain areas of the brain.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/sara_lazar/publications

And that's just from one researcher.

A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Meditation on Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Behaviors

"Clini... (read more)

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[anonymous]110

Judging by the abstract, that paper is irrelevant:

  • It is about metta meditation, not insight meditation (or at least some other popular kind of meditation)
  • The supposed benefits are to the society and not to the individual undertaking the practice.
  • "Most control groups were wait-list or no-treatment"
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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying, "It's dishonest to tell people that 10 minutes of daily meditation has worthwhile benefits"? Are you speaking from personal experience with meditation? Are you aware of the many benefits supported the scientific literature? Are you aware of any research that establishes necessary timelines or "ROI" estimates for those benefits? Do you think there might be a lot of individual variability around the benefits of meditation?

I've elaborated on my position here. Happy to hear your tho... (read more)

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4SarahNibs
Some personal experience. On the order of... ~100 hrs, I think? I am not saying it's dishonest to say it has worthwhile benefits. My guess is that if someone hears about this enlightenment thing and thinks hmmm I wonder if I can...? and then tries insight meditation for 30x 10 minute sessions, the modal result is probably (a) some worthwhile benefits, and (b) believing that the scope of potential worthwhile benefits is far far larger than what 30x 10 minute sessions resulted in. Or, rephrased, that 30x 10 minute sessions just scratched the surface. Or, rephrased, that 30x 10 minute sessions was not "deep". If you want to throw regular 12-person themed dinner parties every weekend, cooking every day for 10 minutes is a fantastic place to start learning the skills you need, and something like that is absolutely necessary for long-term success if you've never cooked, and will definitely have worthwhile benefits, and absolutely is going to miss covering tons and tons of necessary skills. If you told someone your goal and they said "it's actually easy, just cook for 10 minutes a day for 30 days", they would be telling you a false thing. Their advice, if followed, might be the best way to start, but that's not the same thing as true.
2[anonymous]
Could you please elaborate? The last time I checked (quite thoroughly, but it was few years ago), the only confirmed benefit of meditation was in treating chronic anxiety. But even then, it was not more beneficial than other treatments.
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges-30
I read the first ~100 pages of "Why Buddhism is True", but . . .

That's hardly 1/3 of the way in; not very "deep." ;)

Robert Wright is quite well-regarded for his writing on science, history, politics, and religion. His skeptical, non-mystical stance toward meditation sounds like just the thing you'd be keenly interested in. He argues the modern psychological idea of the modularity of mind resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (anatman). One would think that's precisely the kind of thing you are trying to get at... (read more)

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A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges*-40
I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled, the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the
... (read more)
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0[anonymous]
I agree with your request for a definition of the terms used. I see no reason to assume a priori that a runner's training schedule says anything about optimal schedule for meditation. How do you select among meditation instructors those that are leading? If it's their popularity, then clearly their instruction as an aggregate will be biased towards what's appealing to the mass public, rather than what is effective (whatever the word 'effective' might mean in this context). I don't know what the OP means by those terms but two related points I want to raise from my own perspective: * as an avid reader and programmer, I definitely experience some of my reading/programming sessions as deep, and some as shallow. I suspect this distinction is valid for all mental activities. * I know of at least one meditative tradition (Theravada) that distinguishes different depths of meditation. Those are called jhanas, there is 4 or 8 of them, depending on the specific school, and the transition into them or between them is a discreet event. They also specify more gradual transition of mental states before entering the first jhana. I'm not an OP but I do suspect that an individual who fits this bio would be wasting a lot of time for a lot of people. Or rather, provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide. Can't speak specifically about Mr. Goldstein because I don't know how accurate this bio is. That's an interesting point that I've thought about many times. If the supposed benefits of meditation were available without all the sacrifices, for example by taking a pill, I wonder how many meditators would decide to do that. Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that. Otherwise, it would be great if you can clarify this part for m
8Kaj_Sotala
Re: your point that any reductionist explanation is going to be miss a lot: yes, I certainly agree. This is what I was trying to gesture at in the introduction, when I said that this is a non-mystical explanation, not the non-mystical-explanation: because no single explanation can cover everything, and any single framework is going to be insufficient and only cover a particular aspect of the thing. In fact, a previous version of this article included a section where I mentioned that I expect that reading my articles might be slightly harmful for one's actual practice of doing meditation... but that I still think it's worth writing them: I think that while there is a lot that cannot be explained in straightforward reductionist terms, I find that there is also a lot that can be. And three points with regard to that: First, as I suggest in the above excerpt, there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are - for good reason - skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space. Life is full of things that one can do, so one quite reasonably asks "if nobody bothers to give a sensible explanation of what's going on with meditation, isn't the most likely explanation that it's just breaking people's brains and deluding them into thinking that they are having deep insights?" (compare the well-known phenomenon of psychedelics sometimes producing a feeling of deep insight which is totally disconnected from whether one has actually thought of anything insightful). To take your analogy: Suppose that somebody has never tried sex, has no idea of what it is about, and is skeptical of whether it is worth trying. They tell me that before they try it, they want me to distill the sexual experience into straightforward terms and come up with a precise language to correctly capture the essentials and make an unambiguous model that they can inspect. I then try to fulfill their request, doing my best to describe the essence of sex as
4Kaj_Sotala
Well, in my experience, many people (myself included) who get into meditation eventually find it worthwhile to spend significant amounts of time on the practice, on the order of hours a day as well as doing multi-day retreats. There are also teachers who recommend this, as well as research on meditation which suggests that people who have practiced significantly larger amounts get significantly larger effects. My own experience is that 10 minutes per day certainly does something, but much much less than say an hour per day over an extended period, and that an hour per day does less than a multi-day retreat. I didn't have any particularly detailed or rigorous distinction between "deep" and "ordinary" meditation in mind, just that what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and for most people deeper insights seem to require significant investments. I agree that this is a continuum rather than a binary distinction, and didn't mean to imply otherwise. I certainly agree that there's a lot to be said for just forgetting about the result-oriented mindset when doing practice, and some of my later posts will be talking about the reasons why that is. But... well, I didn't really intend to get into a discussion about measuring outcomes in the first place? The whole section that you reacted to was just there to briefly note that I wanted to set the whole topic to the side and not get into it. You make it sound like I was taking some strong position on what kind of practice is worthwhile, when you are responding to what was one sentence in a 3500-word post, in the context of a paragraph saying that this is a separate topic that I'm not going to get into. As well as my comment which was similarly brief, but acknowledged that it was misleading for me to suggest that a small amount of meditation would be useless. Now if you want to discuss this in more detail, then I'm certainly willing to do that... but before I go into depth on covering my model, may I respectfully an
7romeostevensit
Disagree. Zen has a very bad track record while barking heavily up the 'nothing to do' tree. In contrast, technique heavy schools get rapid results, in many cases so rapid that there has to be a degree of warning and caution for people with unstable personality constructs. Pre-buddhist non-dual schools also preach a similar doctrine, and it excuses their teachers from needing to demonstrate results. There are stages where surrender and letting go of efforting is essential, but those are techniques/tools to be employed, not the goal of the path. There are discourses that specifically warn against non-efforting prematurely, or villainizing desire in general unfairly which is called out as spiritual bypassing since it excuses you from the hard work of detecting subtle differences between 'wholesome and unwholesome' desires. Pedagogically, yes, a lot of type-a personality Americans do need heavy decompression before things have room to work.
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10

There are two rules for success in life. First, never tell anyone all that you know.

Just throw away the word “deep”. It’s a dumbbell theory.—an attempt to explain things in terms of opposing pairs of forces or principles. Can you cook, read, or exercise for 10m? Or is anything less than an hour considered “shallow cooking” or “light reading”? .

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3SarahNibs
I mean, sure, it's a time honored practice to lie to people and tell them they can make a substantial fraction of the total progress ("deep") with very little effort, intending to get them to start when otherwise they simply wouldn't, so that they'll find out that it takes very little effort to make a lot of progress even though they'll also find out that the total is more vast than they ever imagined and their little amounts of effort didn't yield a substantial fraction of the total progress. I still hate it.
The real difference between Reductionism and Emergentism
Max Hodges10

Ok then what in the world do you mean by “ cosnsciously” or “parts”? And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms? Is there something magical about then?

Google Craig Venter “synthetic life”

So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake? So an emergent property is just anything accidental? Is software made from parts? So if I make a software application that has unexpected properties whether they are emergent or not all depends on how conscious I was of them when I set out?

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1TAG
I don't mean anything exotic or hard to guess. Just soldering components onto a board, that kind of thing. We can't right now. "Emergence" can be present anywhere if you define it broadly enough. It's not much of a win to prove that emergence is ubiquitous by trivialising the term.
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10
Getting deep in meditation requires a huge investment of time and effort

Not really. You can start with just 5 or 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day for six weeks is just 5 hours (taking weekends off). Not such a huge investment for most. Just cut out a few hours of Netflix over the course of a month-and-a-half.

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5Kaj_Sotala
You can certainly start with that, but the investment for getting started is different from the investment necessary for getting deep. But true, my original wording suggests that you need to invest a lot to get any returns at all, which is wrong.
2SarahNibs
Every recipe I look up on the internet says it takes just 5 minutes. Ideal practice might go quite far with 30x 10 minute practices, enough to call it "deep". Likely practice if you don't spend any time with a mentor, reading/watching online, fixing your sit setup, etc etc etc? Sincerely doubt it would end up enough to call whatever happened "getting deep in meditation". Time actually spent if you have 30x 10 minute practices, given that you'll be doing the above and also transitioning between other things to practice and back, explaining to your partner that you need to not be disturbed during those 10 minutes and answering their questions about meditation, etc etc etc? Way more than 30x10 minutes.
A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble
Max Hodges10

I think you'll find some interesting ideas which address your first point in this Tim Keller talk, especially the points about "recipes vs understanding," seeking first principles, and the point that 99% of what you think is wrong and you only have the remaining 1% to deal with that situation. I see meditation as a process to strength and expand that 1% part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

On the second point, Robert Wright's book "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment" does a pretty good job.

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9Kaj_Sotala
Thanks. I read the first ~100 pages of "Why Buddhism is True", but felt like its discussion was... "on the wrong level" feels like the best term I can think of. Something like, in its discussion of no-self (for instance), it did vaguely say things about what the Buddha might have meant, and then about how evolutionary psychology views the mind, but I was hoping for a discussion that would attempt to dissolve the algorithms behind our experience of the self (or at least some of them).
The Futility of Emergence
Max Hodges60

not exactly. I'm fond of @ryleah's contribution: "Emergence as a term doesn't add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out."

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2TAG
Of course. Emergence and reduction are types of explanation, not explanations themselves.
The Futility of Emergence
Max Hodges*20

I think you're missing the point. To say, "life emerges from the activities of cells" or that "intelligence emerges from non-intelligence" is not simply to make empty statements devoid of meaning. The first is an assertions that "life" isn't a *thing* which one should seek to find somewhere, materially, in nature--like some yet-to-be-cataloged bird of paradise. It's a property of complex cellular processes. There are people who think that brain contains a "core self," as if it were a kind of organ. It ... (read more)

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The Futility of Emergence
Max Hodges10

Thanks. But why does he dismiss each idea?

Emergence as the existence of properties of a system that are not possessed by any of its parts.

That sounds true to me, but he says it's too ubiquitous "so this is surely not what we mean." Uh, why discredit something because it explains a lot of things??

Oddly, he systematically discredits each idea because they don't suit his tastes.

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A game designed to beat AI?
Answer by Max Hodges10

Riddles


Riddle: What month of the year has 28 days?
Answer: All of them

Riddle: What is full of holes but still holds water?
Answer: A sponge

Riddle: What is always in front of you but can’t be seen?
Answer: The future

Riddle. What can you break, even if you never pick it up or touch it?
Answer: A promise

Riddle: A man who was outside in the rain without an umbrella or hat didn’t get a single hair on his head wet. Why?
Answer: He was bald.

Riddle: I shave every day, but my beard stays the same. What am I?
Answer: A barber

Riddle: You ... (read more)

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A game designed to beat AI?
Max Hodges10

Riddles

Riddle: What month of the year has 28 days?
Answer: All of them

Riddle: What is full of holes but still holds water?
Answer: A sponge

Riddle: What is always in front of you but can’t be seen?
Answer: The future

Riddle. What can you break, even if you never pick it up or touch it?
Answer: A promise

Riddle: A man who was outside in the rain without an umbrella or hat didn’t get a single hair on his head wet. Why?
Answer: He was bald.

Riddle: I shave every day, but my beard stays the same. What am I?
Answer: A barber

Riddle: You see a boat filled wit... (read more)

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A game designed to beat AI?
Max Hodges20

Good idea! Maybe but something with more variety than Jenga. I'd bet hard-cash a dedicated team could make a Jenga champion in fraction of that time. Sounds like a fun challenge. Here's are a few impressive robot dexterity projects:

https://openai.com/blog/learning-dexterity/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVmp0uGtShk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiqC9emBk00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk

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A game designed to beat AI?
Max Hodges20

The same is true for Trivia Pursuit. The solution is the same: sell expansion sets. My idea doesn't even merit an upvote? ;)

Here are some riddles which I think would be a challenge:

What occurs only in the middle of each month, in all of the seasons, except summer and happens only in the night, never in the day?

And this one, from Zork, a text-based adventure game I played in the 80s

What is as tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the king's horses can't draw it up?
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1Long try
OK here's an upvote for you ;) Nevertheless, I do think that selling expansion sets is an exploitative way to milk money. Maybe I'm biased by my wanting to protect the environment & avoid too much waste...
Max Hodges10

and I think "akrasia" is better explained by "rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cbgKfAHSLz99zLzuR/stop-saying-wrong-things?commentId=yFrF2YH6N5Z73P4ZM

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Max Hodges80

Speaking to the larger issue you raise, yes, anyone who thinks we are purely rational creatures is deluding themselves:

. . . they failed to appreciate that the self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone e... (read more)

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The real difference between Reductionism and Emergentism
Max Hodges10

Your characterization is far from universally accepted.

See Mechanisms in Science, Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/#ProUndMai

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1TAG
What I say is valid given my definition of mechanism.
Answer by Max Hodges50

You could research it yourself on Google Scholar if you are really interested:

here's an article from 1949. I'm sure there must be other studies!

On the basis of these findings it finally is justified to conclude that the number of only children among persons with self-destructive tendencies does not differ significantly from the expected number as deduced from data available with respect to the general population. Evidently, only children are neither more likely nor less likely to commit suicide than are any other persons, including those who had
... (read more)
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Max Hodges10

Regarding the way Etsy was prioritizing development, it sounds like even their late stage "idea > validate > prototype" cycle is wrong. How can you "validate" before you have a prototype to get feedback on? Where did the idea come from? I'd recommend starting with customer discovery talks. Read "The Mom Test" to learn how to talk to customers about their problems. Then you can take those ideas into a design sprint to mock-up and prototype a feature so that you have something you can get feedback on.

But just because ... (read more)

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1lc
Perhaps >.>
3lc
Yes. It's very obvious. Which is why it's that much more unusual that people make these commitments without more consideration than they tend to put forward. People will intuit that they should do some significant (meaning more than a couple hours) hard research into whether or not it's worth it to get their masters, and where to get it; they tend not to realize that successfully learning a language as remote as Mandarin requires similar time investment as getting the masters degree, even though a necessary part of any plan to do so would be to figure that out, and I don't know why. I suspect that many of these people are just going through the motions with no real objectives in mind, and that's a running theme of my OP. As you say, nothing. The problem, at least in hindsight, was the decision to start in the first place. You can say the decision was correct given the information they had, but I'm trying to make the point that much (most?) of the time this is clearly not the case, and people engage in studying habits that will not ensure they learn the language in the next forty years. Which is not to say that people shouldn't use your product or service. I personally think language acquisition has some pretty significant positive externalities - languages are more useful the more people speak them, after all - but we don't even need to go there. It's just that the way most people set about learning them often implies they're not even trying, to a degree that's difficult to make sense of, at least for me.
1lc
You need to be a little creative. I'll give a trivial example that will probably be more enlightening if you went through the proofs C.S. bachelor students have to do of evaluating upper bounds of algorithms. Lets say you hear about how matrix multiplication is a big problem in ML, and think you have a way to build an algorithm that should give you O(n*sqrt(n)) performance. Your idea happens to be an unusually complicated algorithm and thus a involves a complicated product; you think it will take you around 50 +-20 hours to prototype, and you don't expect to achieve O(n*sqrt(n)) your first try. You could start your project now and build a prototype as quickly as possible, so that you can get a concrete impression of your algorithms viability. Or, you could first sit and consider for a couple hours and see if there are any ways to test or debunk the feasibility of your algorithm. If you choose the first option, you might get twenty hours in and realize your mistake only then. If you choose the second option, you might realize, just by pondering constraints for an hour, that matrix multiplication requires at least O(n^2) reads, and that your algorithm can't in any universe work as fast as you expected it to, so no need to build a prototype without further considering where you're going wrong. Some ideas aren't very easily validated. Art (I assume though I am not an artist) is an area where you pretty much just have a difficult to convey imagined finished product, and the best way to start validating is to build it and see if people like it. Lots of seed stage startups are founded to build things no one wants. The reason the team got funding anyways is often because the utility of the product they're trying to create is difficult to "debunk" from the outset, or fails in hard-to-anticipate ways that aren't caught by standard sanity checking. However, outside of a few of those specific cases, most good ideas can be thought about. It might be impossible to completely r
Max Hodges20

Hi, I've updated my post, toned it down, and added some new content. Hope that helps.

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Max Hodges20

OK I've taken your advice. I toned it down and elaborated. Thanks

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The Futility of Emergence
Max Hodges20

Unmitigated reductionism has had a detrimental effect on drug discovery and vaccine development

We simply can't anticipate or compute some interactions and effects due to the sheer complexity of living organisms in thermodynamic interaction with their environment. For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the n... (read more)

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The real difference between Reductionism and Emergentism
Max Hodges20
The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.

This characterization isn't universally accepted. What you if simple can't anticipate or compute the high-level effect due to the shear complexity and lack of total knowledge? For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the ca... (read more)

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1TAG
The key word is "mechanism", meaning something deliberately and cosnsciously constructed out of parts. No organism is a mechanism in that sense.
Reductionism
Max Hodges10

Answering the question of who is experiencing the illusion [of self] or interpreting the story is much more problematic. This is partly a conceptual problem and partly a problem of dualism. It is almost impossible to discuss the self without a referent in the same way that is difficult to think about a play without any players. Second, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted, and I think that is a dualistic problem if we think we can objectively examine our own minds ind... (read more)

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Reductionism
Max Hodges10

Minsky writing in Society of Mind might bring some light here (paraphrasing):

How can a box made of six boards hold a mouse when a mouse could just walk away from any individual board? No individual board has any "containment" or "mouse-tightness" on it's own. So is "containment" an emergent property?

Of course, it is the way a box prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping ... (read more)

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Max Hodges10

I hope this helps

The most important investment that people can make is not to learn a particular skill—”I'll learn how to code computers,” or “I will learn Chinese,” or something like that. No, the most important investment is really in building this more flexible mind or personality.

https://www.gq.com/story/yuval-noah-harari-tech-future-survival

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Max Hodges*100
Most people just don't even try to believe correct things, and make major life decisions based on transparently bad logic.

That's quite an assertion. What's your source? Evidence? Or is this mere conjecture (here, in this sacred space!)? ;) You advise others to only say true things, but why are you sure this is true?

There is a lot of ambiguity around major life decisions. Many decisions aren't a matter of rationally weighing all the facts, but more a matter of analyzing a bunch of compromises and then rolling the dice. Many major decisi... (read more)

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1lc
Everything Robin Hanson/Eliezer Yudkowsky/Richard Thaler has written + https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/820/208/0d5.jpg With regard to foreign languages, I disagree. Most people study foreign languages so they can use them, or at the very least most wouldn't try if they knew from the outset that there'd be no lasting utility to doing so. Language learning usually involves large time commitments and tedious amounts of memorization. If you study a foreign language because you think it will be useful or cool, and then don't end up speaking it to a degree that makes up for the time invested, then yes, that is a mistake in hindsight. That happens to be the experience of everyone I know, save a linguist friend of mine, that has studied a new language without moving to the country where they speak it. None of your statements are really analogous, because clearly you accomplished lots, and consider the journey worth the effort. I think you mistook the A/B test thing as the only thing in that slideshow that was wrong with the way Etsy was prioritizing development for those first five years. A/B testing can absolutely be a wrong move depending on how many data points you could be collecting and what your programmers could be doing otherwise. I'm trying to build a startup right now and we don't do A/B testing because we don't have enough "interactions" on a regular basis to make it cost effective. But if you let your programmers start new, multi-month projects without asking quickly answered questions like "do we have enough customers who buy furniture for this feature to be worth maintaining or building", then that's clearly bad. It wasn't just that Etsy was too busy preventing the house from burning down to worry about building an A/B test infrastructure, they were advancing new, spurious features without thinking about them. And clearly they were unimaginably successful anyways. Part of my point in the post is to show how poorly you can do things on the "
3Past Account
First couple of sentences seem reasonable, something I was thinking but didn't comment. However, the rest of this seems needlessly aggressive. I'd almost recommend pairing down to the limited critique and fleshing that out in more detail.
How will this recession differ from the last two?
Answer by Max Hodges30
"a bunch of wealth was lost on paper..."

I think you make light of the fact that 861,664 families lost their homes to foreclosure in 2008

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Consistent Glomarization should be feasible
Max Hodges*50

How honest are you really being if you're coming up with silly logical scenarios to avoid answering a question truthfully? I just don't see the point of being "technically honest" when you don't want to reveal something? The only people who say, "I can neither confirm nor deny such and such" is when they are on trial and have a right against self-incrimination--not when they are talking to their friends.

So this all seems silly and unnecessary. If you don't want your friend to know what you did, just change the subje... (read more)

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Why are people so bad at dating?
Answer by Max Hodges-10

If you think having a girlfriend is like picking up free money I suspect you've never had one before ;)

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A game designed to beat AI?
Answer by Max Hodges20

How about if you have to solve brain teasers by visual analogy. For example: a card shows a drawing of a bear and a 12-inch ruler; answer is "BAREFOOT." A pair of dice showing the value of 2 (one and one); answer: "SNAKE EYES." The word "READ" between two lines; answer: "READ BETWEEN THE LINES." The word "agent" twice; answer: "DOUBLE AGENT." A picture of an Apple and the number 3.14158. You get the point.

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1Long try
I think this approach tries to use puns to confuse AI... but it'll get old quickly for humans. Once the card is answered, it can no longer be of much value next times.
A game designed to beat AI?
Max Hodges10

How about if you have to solve brain teasers by visual analogy. For example: a card shows a drawing of a bear and a 12-inch ruler; answer is "BAREFOOT." A pair of dice showing the value of 2 (one and one); answer: "SNAKE EYES." The word "READ" between two lines; answer: "READ BETWEEN THE LINES." The word "agent" twice; answer: "DOUBLE AGENT." A picture of an Apple and the number 3.14158. You get the point.

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I'd Like To Maximizing Profit and Happiness but My Happiness conflicts a lot with making profit...
Answer by Max Hodges*40

It's easy to be happy: give up on your goals. After I finish some project or solve some problem, I enjoy a brief moment of happiness. Then I quickly move on to the next challenge. If we simply bask in that happiness forever, we'd never get anything done. Happiness should remain a byproduct of accomplishing goals; not a goal in itself.

People are pretty shallow and dull. Maybe this is because they are already too happy with themselves. We have lot of problems in the world that could use some attention, Maybe we'd be better off if people were ... (read more)

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2Master MintZ
Thank You for your input.
The real difference between Reductionism and Emergentism
Max Hodges10

I find your brickwork bridge overly complex. I propose a more simple example (borrowed from Minsky's SOM): How can a box made of six boards hold a mouse when a mouse could just walk away from any individual board? No individual board has any "containment" or "mouse-tightness" on it's own. So is "containment" an emergent property?

Of course, it is the way a box prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going r... (read more)

Reply