All of R S's Comments + Replies

R S10

I agree with this although it makes me think about company culture 

There is huge emergent value to some of the.. let's call them "softer" communication approaches 

It becomes possible to get out of random suboptimal Nash equilibriums almost immediately 

People can give more to each other, and better receive feedback 

But I think the only way to do this is by having the type of people who already think in those terms and prefer them 

There's not a lot you can do to enforce it 

But it's still a thing, and in my opinion it's still a t... (read more)

R S10

I'm getting strong DarqqWolf vibes to this whole saga

Although I've been that guy like 15 yrs ago, so I don't fault him for it that much

And at least he's pushing a fairly novel idea and taking it seriously

R S10

Everyone is more likely to move to cities 

I vaguely remember that some physicist calculated that the density of everything you want increases by 15% every time a city doubles in size 

So there's essentially a gravitational pull to cities 

Not unlike how (unconstrained by gravity) sea creatures continue to grow in mass because it's more heat energy efficient due to the difference in scaling of volume to surface area

R S20

I agree with this insofar as this has always been my default / 60% case

Selfishly I also hope this is how it plays out (for sake of my career)

I also believe that it is the mainstream view 

But independently I think there's a 20 to 30% chance that this is it, singularity hits very soon 

And I have to be prepared for that

R S10

Yeah I like that approach 

Part of it's probably that I work very long hours often 7 days a week (blah blah stash money before ASI kills my differentiator)

The biggest thing is not having a goal of being able to prove a solution to myself 

Like stop the search early basically

Don't need to formalize or document everything or remember every finding

I think most of the time the brain actually does a pretty good job of gradually solving problems over time without conscious thought 

We don't think of it as thought because it's not conscious or subtitl... (read more)

2Raemon
FYI I do currently think "learn when/how to use your subconcious to process things" is an important tool in the toolbox (I got advice about that from a mentor I went to talk to). Some of the classes of moves here are: * build up intuitions about when it is useful to background process things vs deliberate-process them * if your brain is sort of subconsciously wandering in a rut, use a small amount of agency to direct your thoughts in a new direction, but then let them wander once you get them rolling down the hill in that new direction
R S71

I basically discovered the same form of thinking after I learned the concept of amplification and distillation 

The long-term results of this was severe OCD that took me 1.5-2 years to cut back

This is not to say that it's a bad idea, or a bad idea for everyone 

But it's a very, very bad idea for some people 

Basically I would spend so many hours every day just thinking, stuck in thought loops, stuck trying to gain some value out of generalizing 

Trying to compress mental models that are impossible to learn implicitly into simplified models/... (read more)

3Raemon
Mm, that does make sense, thanks for the warning. Part of my overall flow is "during working hours (where I'm trying to apply this sort of thing), any 'meta' I do is something that needs to pay off within a week." (I let myself do meta in weekends/evenings with less restriction, coming more out of my "hobby/after-hours-self-improvement" budget). "Have a handle on when you're going overboard and need to focus back on just getting momentum on object-level progress" makes sense as an important foundational skill here.  On my day-to-day, I do the 5-10 minute version of this in the morning. Do you feel right now like you found a happy balance, or are you kinda in "recovering alcoholic, not even one drink of think-it-faster-meta is safe?"