All of pjeby's Comments + Replies

More diplomatically: people are terrified of disapproval and will do anything to avoid feeling they deserve it, so if you must point out that something isn't working, try to do so in such a way that the easiest way for them to resolve their cognitive dissonance isn't "blow you off" or "get mad at you". i.e., find a way for them to "save face".

(As a lot of people associate being incorrect with being deserving of disapproval.)

More specifically, the issue is that the img srcset attribute contains unescaped commas, causing the URLs to be broken. Deleting the srcset attributes fixes the image, or replacing all the f_auto, q_auto bits in the srcset with f_auto%2cq_auto fixes it.

It looks like maybe this is a bug in LW's support for uploaded images?

I expect business and sales people would mostly not feel similarly, though to be fair it's uncommon for business friendships/acquaintances to reach "best friend" or better status. The vibe of somebody putting you in a CRM to stay in touch without any direct/immediate monetary benefit is like, "oh, how thoughtful of you / props for being organized / I should really be doing that".

Anyway, the important question isn't how most people would feel, it's how one's desired friends in particular would feel. And many people might feel things like "honored this busy person with lots of friends wants to upgrade our friendship and is taking action to make sure it happens -- how awesome".

Benevolence towards others flows out of shared values; unconditional regard others-in-general is unnatural.

Now there's a nice quotable quote. I don't think it's entirely accurate, unless people with certain kinds of lobe damage or meditation history count as "unnatural". (Which I suppose they could.) On the other hand, those people arguably have brains that define others as themselves, and thus having shared values with said ohters as a matter of course. (Or alternately, I suppose they have a very expansive definition of "shared values".)

But as a tr... (read more)

we don’t think that shutdown-seeking avoids every possible problem involved with reward misspecification

Seems like this is basically the alignment problem all over again, with the complexity just moved to "what does it mean to 'shut down' in the AI's inner model".

For example, if the inner-aligned goal is to prevent its own future operation, it might choose to say, start a nuclear war so nobody is around to start it back up, repair it, provide power, etc.

it doesn't have the kind of insight into its motives that we do

Wait, human beings have insight into their own motives that's better than GPTs have into theirs? When was the update released, and will it run on my brain? ;-)

Joking aside, though, I'd say the average person's insight into their own motives is most of the time not much better than that of a GPT, because it's usually generated in the same way: i.e. making up plausible stories.

What I was pointing out is that the barrier is asymmetrical: it's biased towards AIs with more-easily-aligned utility functions. A paperclipper is more likely to be able to create an improved paperclipper that it's certain enough will massively increase its utility, while a more human-aligned AI would have to be more conservative.

In other words, this paper seems to say, "if we can create human-aligned AI, it will be cautious about self-improvement, but dangerously unaligned AIs will probably have no issues."

The first and most obvious issue here is that an AI that "solves alignment" sufficiently well to not fear self-improvement is not the same as an AI that's actually aligned with humans. So there's actually no protection there at all.

In fact, the phenomenon described here seems to make it more likely that an unaligned AI will be fine with self-improving, because the simpler the utility function the easier time it has guaranteeing the alignment of the improved version!

Last, but far from least, self-improvement of the form "get faster and run on more processo... (read more)

Nope - expression of feelings of friendship isn't part of the explicit structure of friendship either. Lots of people are friends without saying anything about it.

All I've really said here is that the difference between VCFWB and a "romantic" relationship is difficult to discern, especially from the outside, and given that the nature of "romance" is both internal and optional to the relationship. If a pair of VCFWB's stop having sex or hanging out or cuddling, it's hard to say they're still in a VCFWB relationship. But if people in a "romantic" relation... (read more)

I'm assuming "relationship" here means something like "the explicit structure and boundaries of behavior as agreed upon by the parties" - friends, friends with benefits, marriage, polycule etc. People's romantic feelings and expressions are rarely something that's part of a relationship's explicit structure, even if people often have a lot of implicit expectations about them. (And any of those named structures can include romantic feelings, or a lack thereof.)

Direct quotes:

Which seems to give me just as much control[4] over the past as I have over the future.

And the footnote:

whatever I can do to make my world the one with FA in it, I can do to make my world the one with HA in it.

This is only trivially true in the sense of saying "whatever I can do to arrive at McDonalds, I can do to make my world the one where I walked in the direction of McDonalds". This is ordinary reality and nothing to be "bothered" by -- which obviates the original question's apparent presupposition that something weird is going o... (read more)

I'm not sure how much that rephrasing would change the rest of your answer

Well, it makes the confusion more obvious, because now it's clearer that HA/A and HB/B are complete balderdash. This will be apparent if you try to unpack exactly what the difference between them is, other than your choice. (Specifically, the algorithm used to compute your choice.)

Let's say I give you a read-only SD card containing some data. You will insert this card into a device that will run some algorithm and output "A" or "B". The data on the card will not change as a re... (read more)

The confusion is resolved if you realize that both A and B here are mental simulations. When you observe the ball moving, it allows you to discard some of your simulations, but this doesn't affect the past or future, which already were whatever they were.

To view the ball as affecting the past is to confuse the territory (which already was in some definite state) with your map (which was in a state of uncertainty re: the territory).

I've been married just under 27 years now, and ooey gooeyness has been on a long slow uptrend, so I don't think that irrationality, drama, or short-livedness have anything to do with it. We were together for five years before that, and I asked her to marry me because at some point it became obvious that I couldn't see spending the rest of my life without her.

Granted, the first year or two of knowing each other was rather turbulent, but during that time I mostly didn't see her as The One or really even very Significant. That was something that took time, ... (read more)

I'm not aro and I 100% agree with the suggestion to taboo the concept of "romantic" (as attached to the word "relationship", other than as a shorthand for "relationship where both parties experience romantic feelings"). Properly reduced, the things described as love and romance are experiences internal to individuals rather than a property of relationships. (Otherwise unrequited love would not be a thing.)

AFAICT, the thing that distinguishes very-close-friends-with-benefits is the ooey gooey feeling that one's Other is very Significant, and that one woul... (read more)

Thiseems a bit overkill when there are such things as bookmarks and pinning sites to your home page. Also if you have a bookmark manager app you can just make that your home page.

"many people believe that they can control others when they can't"

It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract:

The Curse of the Counterfactual is a side-effect of the way our brains process is-ought distinctions. It causes our brains to compare our past, present, and future to various counterfactual imaginings, and then blame and punish ourselves for the difference between reality, and whatever we just made up to replace it.

I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary - they seem utterly ... (read more)

In my mind the difference is that "for signalling purposes" contains an aspect of a voluntary decision (and thus blame-worthiness for the consequences),

I was attributing the purpose to our brain/genes, not our selves. i.e., the ability to have such moods is a hardwired adaptation to support (sincere-and-not-consciously-planned) social signaling.

It's not entirely divorced from consciousness, though, since you can realize you're doing it and convince the machinery that it's no longer of any benefit to keep doing it in response to a given trigger.

So it's ... (read more)

That's not really therapeutic, except maybe insofar as it produces a more rewarding high than doing it by yourself. (Which is not really a benefit in terms of the overall system.)

To the extent it's useful, it's the part where evidence is provided that other people can know them and not be disgusted by whatever their perceived flaws are. But as per the problem of trapped priors, this doesn't always cause people to update, so individual results are not guaranteed.

The thing that actually fixes it is updates on one's rules regarding what forms, evidence, or ... (read more)

Most long-lasting negative emotions and moods exist solely for social signaling purposes, without any direct benefit to the one experiencing them. (Even when it's in private with nobody else around.)

Feeling these emotions is reinforcing (in the learning sense), such that it can be vastly more immediately rewarding (in the dopamine/motivation sense) to stew in a funk criticizing one's self, than ever actually doing anything.

And an awful lot of chronic akrasia is just the above: huffing self-signaling fumes that say "I can't" or "I have to" or "I suck".

This... (read more)

• I want to get in shape
• we decided to make the event cooler
• it doesn’t yet seem good enough

Notice that all of these goals are either socially focused, or at least sufficiently abstract as to allow for that interpretation. And this is almost certainly where the trouble begins.

For example, if the desire to "get in shape" is fundamentally about signaling (far thinking), rather than specific, concrete benefits we'll get from it (near thinking), then we'll be primed to think about the options in far-mode signaling terms.

And in signaling terms, "work out at... (read more)

Has he tried over-the-counter stimulant supplements like tyrosine, PEA, or for that matter caffeine? The book The Mood Cure contains useful dosing and experimental guidelines for a very wide variety of easily available, non-prescription, mostly non-"drug" nutrients or herbal supplements that can have positive effects on concentration, productivity, creativity, and both physical and mental energy levels -- mostly with fewer and milder side-effects than prescription medications or controlled substances. The right supplementation can be life-changing on its own.

Other feature transfers:

• If you like outlining, you probably also want the Outliner plugin, maybe the Zoom plugin, and to assign hotkeys for their various commands.
• If you want to link/embed blocks, Copy Block Link, Block Reference Count, and others may be of interest

In general, searching the community plugins list for things related to blocks, outlines, and roam will find you potentially useful things.

You can fry eggs in the microwave. I use a disposable paper bowl, pour in a bit of oil (I use coconut), swirl it to coat the bottom and a bit of the sides (or use a cooking spray). Crack two eggs in, break yolks and puncture surface of the whites, then cover with folded paper towel, pop it in the microwave and hit "1". (Cooking time will vary by microwave, bowl size, etc. so you'll need to experiment.) Toss the bowl when you're done, and that's it for cleanup.

(Note: technically, the eggs are more being poached than fried, but the oil makes the taste and texture closer to fried eggs. There just won't be any browining.)

How can you read 2-3x faster than a person speaks (1x)?

From Wikipedia:

Subvocalization readers (Mental readers) generally read at approximately 250 words per minute, auditory readers at approximately 450 words per minute and visual readers at approximately 700 words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read 280–350 wpm without compromising comprehension.

Conversational speech is generally 100 to 180wpm, so even subvocalizing readers already have a leg up. "Proficient" readers by Wikipedia's definition are easily in the 2-3x range over this, and visual readers even more so.

Wait, what?

From Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial:

"Opponents of evidence-based medicine have frequently argued that no one would perform a randomized trial of parachute use. We have shown this argument to be flawed, having conclusively shown that it is possible to randomize participants to jumping from an aircraft with versus without parachutes (albeit under limited and specific scenarios)."

Read it and weep. (Or laugh, whichever helps you sleep better.)

I've never been to a professional. It's literally "press and hold". I have a few items I use (a Knobble and a BodyBackBuddy), but anything hard with a rounded end (like the size/shape of the rounded tip on a broom handle) will do in a pinch. I read in one trigger point book the best ways to use your hands to reduce giving yourself hand pain, but tools are even better. For some trigger points, a hard rubber ball, a flat surface, and your weight are the easiest way to do it.

Finding the points isn't terribly hard either -- you know when you've found one b... (read more)

Yes. I'm also saying it's common for human beings to use absolutes as a means to disclaim responsibility for their own choices or motives while emotionally blackmailing others to do what they want. This has less to do with the absoluteness of the proposition, and more to do with the concealed message that "you deserve to feel bad about yourself if you don't comply with my (concealed/disclaimed) wishes".

I call this an "FBI message", i.e. "feel bad if". People tend to focus on the seemingly factual/reasonable part of a communication or idea like, "you fai... (read more)

I am not willing to say most people in human history across cultures were abused or damaged by this.

Neither am I, as I explained at great length in my previous reply. Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.

In the context I mentioned -- i.e. the context of a person who has motivation and decision-making problems, absolutes in one's upbringing remain a red flag that require investigation, since they're most likely a problem.

Perhaps the context isn't sufficiently clear? I'm saying here that if I'm working with somebody and they mention an abs... (read more)

They're the way all social mores are understood in most cultures

And that's precisely why they're so easily (and commonly) abused for deception and manipulation.

But the real issue is their being absolute, rather than things you can weigh and trade off (see e.g. your earlier mention of your mother's attitudes). Absolutes are thought-stoppers and give you no room to make your own judgments.

So in the context of being a functional, emotionally-free-to-choose adult, universals and absolutes are always a red flag worth checking. Anything that can be claimed ... (read more)

Knowing this doesn't help me resolve all the infinite variety of individual cases,

Man I wish it did. My life and work would be soooo much easier. But yeah, it definitely does not.

but it's very interesting to see that to a great extent it's about her failure to provide me with any kind of clarity and certainty about what was important, what was not, and how I ought to behave about important things.

Sort of? The only caveat here is that this phrasing implies there are absolutes, and IME whenever families deal in absolutes, it's as a form of deceptiv... (read more)

As I said, I can't really comment on the parenting aspect. My own perspective is strictly "use the behavior as a model to envision alternatives to fix fucked-up parenting" in the minds of people (like me) who had certain kinds of fucked up parenting.

(That this seems to produce good results does not really prove that doing those things would be good parenting, though, especially since human beings can fuck anything up if they really want to, and turn the most wonderful things into weapons of abuse with even just a little effort.)

I came across the CC at a p... (read more)

There is another model, wherein the problem is trigger points. Trigger points crop up when a muscle is under strain, and then they tend to stay that way. Trigger points, once created, constrict blood flow or impinge on nerves, creating all sorts of problems. (My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon twice for things that later turned out to be trigger points: my teeth had gotten sensitive after dental work, but it turned out that I developed trigger points from having my mouth open for hours during the procedure. Now I know where to massage my neck an... (read more)

would I be right in guessing that it's you who have been downvoting all my comments in this thread

I did not downvote all your comments in this thread -- a fact that should already have been known to you before you wrote this one, if you had examined the vote counts. (I downvoted only two of them in an effort to end discussion of a topic I find offensive and upsetting, but that effort proved pointless by the time of your third reply, so I gave up.)

you did imply that there was no reasonable way to interpret you as having said X

I did not imply that, y... (read more)

So, I wrote a post using word A, you took that to mean word B and said so (or rather, implied it).

Since I did not intend to imply B, I edited the post to reduce usage of word A.

You are now presenting this as evidence that I must therefore have meant to use word B all along.

[insert Picard facepalm and/or Jackie Chan WTF face meme here]

This seems utterly nonsensical to me, especially since if I had used or even meant word B, an important argument in my original comment would make no sense. (The one about 50% of the population -- which would obviously not ap... (read more)

It was always 100% clear to me what you meant. I said I was confused as to why you thought it was what I meant, since, you know, it wasn't. (And I even removed two instances of a relevant word from my comment in response to yours, to make it clear that wasn't what I meant.)

And when I said "don't enlighten me" (with a winky emoticon no less) it was a joke to lighten the part where I basically said, "please stop this line of discussion: I don't want to participate in it, not least because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about."

IOW, from my per... (read more)

I guess you wrote that not so much because you seriously think Matt is signalling a preference for the underage, or that others will think so, as because you hope that giving him a bit of a shock might help him avoid saying such creepy-sounding things. If so, then I think making that suggestion three times is really a bit much.

I grew up in a time where it was a frequent feminist talking point that adult women are not "girls", and thus "girls" were -- by implication -- not adults.

I have edited my comment, however, to use "immature" rather than hammering ... (read more)

I felt that the only lesson I learned was that people I interact with are more politically correct than I realized. And they’ll look for ways to misinterpret a statement I meant literally.

Most people intuitively interpret statements non-literally, through a frame of "why is this person saying this?" If you make a statement like "hot girls excite me", a statement which most people by default would assume applies to any heterosexual male (not to mention a lot of women), then the default assumption is going to be that you mean something specific by it, be... (read more)

one of the important elements of what I'm calling "orientation" is locating-the-thing-that-needs-admitting, in the space of all the possible things you might need to admit

True! Perhaps orientation should be that part in an orient-admit-grieve trifecta. It's certainly the longer part, anyway.

I mostly do orientation by asking what it is I least want to admit, most wish were not true, and/or am most afraid is true. Then admitting those things are true or at least that they might be or that I'm afraid they are or wish they weren't.

Also, per Curse of the ... (read more)

Upvoted: deliberate grieving is a critical self-improvement skill. I personally mostly frame it in terms of admitting, rather than letting go or accepting; in terms of your two steps, I've been calling the orientation part "admitting", and the catharsis part "grieving".

A lot of critical motivation drivers are hung up on trying to get positive things from people that we didn't get as kids, and that we created a bunch of coping mechanisms (e.g. most kinds of perfectionism) to work around.

Admitting that we were hurt by not getting those things and that our c... (read more)

Also, some LWers are neither young nor healthy, and/or have family responsibilities that would become problematic or impossible at some levels of lasting lung or organ damage, whether you call it "long covid" or not. So I'm definitely waiting for more understanding of long-term effects before I change my risk profile.

Downvoted due to lacking a story to provide an intuition pump to readers as to why the following the proposal would be useful.

I would question the framing of mental subagents as "mesa optimizers" here. This sneaks in an important assumption: namely that they are optimizing anything. I think the general view of "humans are made of a bunch of different subsystems which use common symbols to talk to one another" has some merit, but I think this post ascribes a lot more agency to these subsystems than I would. I view most of the subagents of human minds as mechanistically relatively simple.

I actually like mesa-optimizer because it implies less agency than "subagent". A mesa-optim... (read more)

So it's kinda like a hobby, from my perspective.

Sure. I have not seriously taken up meditation again since that time, because although the centered-and-confident stuff was really nice, it took a long time to get to that point, and it wasn't a superpower level of centered or confident.

So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards

"Would you like to talk for a bit? Please say no if you'd actually prefer doing something else, and I'm cool with that. I only wish to hang out if it's mutually beneficial. :)"

I would say that a non-socially-anxious person would never say all of that, maybe not even the "Would you like to talk for a bit?" part. And that many people would respond with suspicion to the doth-protest-too-much-methinks length of your communication. (And other socially anxious or neurotic people may respond by internal agonizing over whether they are correctly evaluating th... (read more)

Seems to describe "meditation" as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.

This is precisely what I find weird about this. When I first studied Zen, the book I read listed four different basic techniques, and that's just Zen! (A lot of early meditation studies were also on TM, which is mantra-based. I think modern studies of meditation, however, are now more focused on "mindfulness" rather than meditation per se, and that mindfulness may in fact be more precisely defined than "meditation" in its full generality, since there are meditation p... (read more)

To be clearer, I'm not saying to use any of the things I said as strategies or tactics. I'm more saying that if one is not trying to get anything from people and doesn't feel themselves unworthy of receiving, then it feels more natural to interact in ways that don't invite rejection and don't put other people on the spot.

Statements are often veiled invitations or requests

Exactly my point: IME social anxiety is correlated with a craving for acceptance or interaction that makes the statement a veiled invitation or request, and no amount of verbal discla... (read more)