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Pattern — LessWrong

Replying toPlease don't throw your mind away

T: "Gah, I really need to write this up as a blog post. Giving an example that I'm not really into at the moment seems kind of bad. But ok, so, [[goes on a rambling five-minute monologue that starts bored and boring, until visibly excited about some random thing like the origin of writing or the implausibility of animals with toxic flesh evolving or emergent modularity enabled by gene regulatory networks or the revision theory of truth or something; see the appendix for examples]]"

Still reading the rest of this.

"Playful Thinking" (Curiosity driven exploration) may be serendipitous for other stuff you're doing, but there isn't a guarantee. Pursuing it because you want to... (read more)

Replying toIn Defense of Chatbot Romance

Pattern3y

In Defense of Chatbot Romance

It might be a browser compatibility issue?

This should be spoilered. I typed it, and didn't copy paste it.

Replying toIn Defense of Chatbot Romance

Pattern3y

In Defense of Chatbot Romance

This seems like it might be useful to post to that subreddit.

Replying to[S] D&D.Sci: All the D8a. Allllllll of it.

Pattern3y

[S] D&D.Sci: All the D8a. Allllllll of it.

What are people using to load and analyze the data?

Replying toHuman-AI collaborative writing

Pattern3y

Human-AI collaborative writing

Is your writing online anywhere?

Replying toIf instead of giving out dividends, public companies bought total market index funds, which companies would be the biggest?

Pattern3y

If instead of giving out dividends, public companies bought total market index funds, which companies would be the biggest?

Usually posts with: "D&D.Sci" in the title.

Replying toChallenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal

Pattern3y

Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal

As a speaker of a native language that has only genderneutral pronouns and no gendered ones, I often stumble and misgender people out of disregard of that info because that is just not how referring works in my brain. I suspect that natives don't have this property and the self-reports are about them.

What language is this?

Replying toDid ChatGPT just gaslight me?

Pattern3y

Did ChatGPT just gaslight me?

It reminds me of a move made in a lawsuit.

Replying toDid ChatGPT just gaslight me?

Pattern3y

Did ChatGPT just gaslight me?

But you said that I should use orange juice as a replacement because it's similarly sweet.

Does ChatGPT think tequila is sweet, orange juice is bitter...or is it just trying to sell you drinks?*

tequila has a relatively low alcohol content

Relative to what ChatGPT drinks no doubt.

And tequila doesn’t have any sugar at all.

*Peer pressure you into it drinking it maybe.

At best this might describe some drinks that have tequila in them. Does it know the difference between "tequila" and "drinks with tequila"?

Does ChatGPT not differentiate between sweet and sugar, or is ChatGPT just an online bot that improvises everything, and gaslights you when it's called on it? It keeps insisting:

..."I was simply pointing... (read more)

Replying toCOVID-19 Group Testing Post-mortem?

Pattern3y

COVID-19 Group Testing Post-mortem?

these success stories seem to boil down to just buying time, which is a good deal less impressive.

The counterpart to 'faster vaccination approval' is 'buying time' though. (Whether or not it ends up being well used, it is good at the time. The other reason to focus on it is - how much can you affect pool testing versus vaccination approval speed? Other stuff like improving statistical techniques might be easier for a lot of people than changing a specific organization.

World's First Octopus Farm - Linkpost to a Linkpost

Pattern

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jSaAitdE5ejv4xj4P/world-s-first-octopus-farm-linkpost

Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

Pattern

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

When reading https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/conservation-of-expected-evidence/history, I noticed this:

A consequence of this principle is that absence of evidence is evidence of ~~absence.~~absence.

I was going by colors (that's how it appears there, instead of the crossed out effect ~~here~~). But it's not clear what the change is. (I'm trying to understand how to read this stuff.)

Open & Welcome Thread - December 2020

Pattern

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There is a general pattern that occurs wherein something is expressed as a dichotomy/binary. Switching to a continuum afterwards is an extension, but this does not necessarily include all the possibilities.

Dichotomies: True/False. Beautiful/Ugly.

True/False.

Logic handles this by looking for 'all true'.

If 'p' is true, and 'q' is false, 'p and q' is false.

More generally, a sentence could be broken up into parts that can be individually rated. After this, the ratio of true (atomic) statements to false (atomic) statements could be expressed - unless all the sub-statements are true, or all false. This can be fixed be expressing the 'score' as a (rational) number, with two choices of score:

true(sentence) = number of... (read 1080 more words →)

"The No True Scotsman fallacy" is often cited when people do things like defining X not as Y, but Y when Y works.* This is the (explicit) ideal (that people may admit to). While those asking "What is X" are probably interested in "When does Y work?", if X/a group that defines itself based on X (and refers to itself with the label 'X'), then since their goal is to achieve that ideal, they themselves would very much like to know/and are working on "what is necessary to make Y work/happen?". Thus 'Y is not working' may be (seen as) a criticism of (the group) X - and spark some debate. (The... (read more)

This thread get Meta (about LW) here, TLDR here. (I discuss a feature I think would be useful, that might affect user interaction, in hopes of starting a discussion. This may become a post for that purpose later.)

Comment types (on posts):

-Content related:

--Comments (I love this post/I hate this post/etc.)

--Questions

-Styling related:

--Errata

--bolding [X] might increase readability

--[X] would be good in a summary of the posts

General Styling question: Does this site support bulleted lists which contain bulleted lists?

Two models of how feedback is useful, for making corrections.

1) Post quality*:

Write an article.
Get feedback.
Re-write the article (if necessary).

2) Communication

Say a thing/write a post.
People respond.
If responses indicates prior message was unclear, respond and explain the unclear part/revise post or 'change future posts.'**

*Intended generally. May also apply to books, etc.

** This is a subset of (possible) responses, because it is still about communicating the same idea/s, rather than doing something new.

Thanks to this question, I recently started thinking about how progress on open problems in math [1] could be made faster, at least with regard to low hanging fruit. I made a comment there about modeling the problem (how can progress be made faster) and a possible solution. This brings me to a few questions:

Modeling the problem.
Solving the problem.
Is this a big enough deal that people want it solved? Or are people only interested in something like a) More narrow areas with obvious value being improved? b) The creation of a platform where people can put money on specific things that they want solved being solved/progress being made. c) Something else?
How to test all of the

... (read more)

Some ideas on structure:

[moved]

Bookmarking comments (This is a list.)

Also pages (https://www.lesswrong.com/allComments) and sequences (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).

Better stored tag-wise (Issue appeared here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/po8guXNhXzXYo5yFM/shortform#YzXqCuWTZqF8ZTToX)

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[Linkpost] The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

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World's First Octopus Farm - Linkpost to a Linkpost

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[Linkpost] The importance of stupidity in scientific research

World's First Octopus Farm - Linkpost to a Linkpost

Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

Open & Welcome Thread - December 2020

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[Linkpost] The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

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World's First Octopus Farm - Linkpost to a Linkpost

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[Linkpost] The importance of stupidity in scientific research

World's First Octopus Farm - Linkpost to a Linkpost

Open & Welcome Thread December 2021

Open & Welcome Thread - December 2020

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