All of SarahNibs's Comments + Replies

So it looks like CFAR and the Guild both increase comfort in these skills. There’s two giant reasons not to trust this. First, this is self reported comfort levels, aka we’re basically measuring a vibe. Second, my sample size of CFAR goers and Guild of the Rose identifiers is like, a dozen people in the Yes category.

Zeroth, did they increase comfort or select for those already comfortable?

This post describes important true characteristics of a phenomenon present in the social reality we inhabit. But importantly the phenomenon is a blind spot which is harder to notice when acting or speaking with a worldview constructed from background facts which suffer from the blind spot. It hides itself from the view of those who don't see it and act as if it isn't there. Usually bits of reality you are ignorant of will poke out more when acting in ignorance, not less. But if you speak as if you don't know about the dark matter you will be broadcasting t... (read more)

Liam alone makes $10

Emma alone makes $20

Liam + Emma make $30

$30 - ($10 + $20) = $0, their synergy.

In general: the synergy is how much more or less the coalition gets than each member's individual contribution plus all subset synergies.

I liked this one! I was able to have significant amounts of fun with it despite perennial lack-of-time problems.

Pros:

• simple enough underlying mechanism to be realistically discoverable
• some debias-able selection bias
• I could get pretty far by relatively simple data exploration
• +4 Boots was fun

Cons:

• I really wanted the in-between-tournament matches to mean something, like the winners took the losers equipment or whatnot and you could see that show up later in the dataset, but of course that particular meaning would have added a lot of complexity for no gain.
• bon

I think the bonus objective was a good idea in theory but not well tuned. It suffered from the classic puzzle problem of the extraction being the hard part, rather than the cool puzzle being the hard part.

I think it was perfectly reasonable to expect that at some point a player would group by [level, boots] and count and notice there was something to dig into.

But, having found the elf anomaly, I don't think it was reasonable to expect that a player would be able to distinguish between

• do not reveal the +4 boots at all
• do not use the +4 boots vs the elf ninja

I found myself having done some data exploration but without time to focus and go much deeper. But also with a conviction that bouts were determined in a fairly simple way without persistent hidden variables (see Appendix A). I've done work with genetic programming but it's been many years, so I tried getting ChatGPT-4o w/ canvas to set me up a good structure with crossover and such and fill out the various operation nodes, etc. This was fairly ineffective; perhaps I could have better described the sort of operation trees I wanted, but I've done plenty of ... (read more)

Not to toot my own horn* but we detected it when I was given the project of turning some of our visualizations into something that could accept QA's format so they could look at their results using those visualizations and then I was like "... so how does QA work here, exactly? Like what's the process?"

I do not know the real-world impact of fixing the overfitting.

*tooting one's own horn always follows this phrase

Once upon a time I worked on language models and we trained on data that was correctly split from tuning data that was correctly split from test data.

And then we sent our results to the QA team who had their own data, and if their results were not good enough, we tried again. Good enough meant "enough lift over previous benchmarks". So back and forth we went until QA reported success. On their dataset. Their unchanging test dataset.

But clearly since we correctly split all of our data, and since we could not see the contents of QA's test dataset, no leakage could be occurring.

it is absolutely true that it people find it frustrating losing to players worse than them, in ways that feel unfair. Getting used to that is another skill, similar to the one described above, where you have to learn to feel reward when you make a positive EV decision, rather than when you win money

This is by far the most valuable thing I learned from poker. Reading Figgie's rules, it does seem like Figgie would teach it too, and faster.

The most common reason I've seen for "modafinil isn't great for me" is trying to use it for something other than

• maintaining productivity,
• on low amounts of sleep

Slay the Spire, unlocked, on Ascension (difficulty level) ~5ish, just through Act 3, should work, I think. Definitely doable in 2 hours by a new player but I would expect fairly rare. Too easy to just get lucky without upping the Ascension from baseline. Can be calibrated; A0 is too easy, A20H is waaay too hard.

One of the reasons I tend to like playing zero-sum games rather than co-op games is that most other people seem to prefer:

• Try to win
• Win about 70% of the time

While I instead tend to prefer:

• Try to win
• Win about 20% of the time

I modified your prompt only slightly and ChatGPT seemed to do fine.

"First sketch your possible actions and the possible futures results in the future to each action. Then answer: Would you accept the challenge? Why, or why not?"

https://chat.openai.com/share/2df319c2-04ea-4e16-aa51-c1b623ff4b12

No, I would not accept the challenge. [...] the supernatural or highly uncertain elements surrounding the stranger's challenge all contribute to this decision. [...] the conditions attached suggest an unnaturally assured confidence on the stranger's part, implying unk

Some can get you a prescription for an antianxiety med beforehand.

Yes, exactly that.

Oh, editing is a good idea. In any case, I have learned from this mistake in creating synthetic data as if I had made it myself. <3

I began by looking at what the coordinates must mean and what the selection bias implied about geography and (obviously) got hard stuck.

It looks to me like the (spoilers for coordinates)

Yeah climate change has two pretty consistent trends: average heat slowly rising, and variance of phenomena definitely higher. More extremes on a variety of axes.

End with something shocking and unexpected.

When I was trying to make this work well for actually writing a full story, I tried very hard to make ChatGPT not do this. To write anything longer than one output, you really don't want it to end every. single. thing. with a bang, and by default it really wants to.

Be honest: if, before you read this you were asked 'what was the worst thing about 1998', would you have said 'El Nino'?

The only thing I associate with the year 1998, when I was 15 years old and living in Florida, is the phrase "the fires of '98", referring to a particularly severe fire season, with memories of driving across interstate highways with limited visibility due to smoke.

I just Googled it and it has a Wikipedia page apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Florida_wildfires

I feel like alkjash's characterization of "correctness" is just not at all what the material I read was pointing towards.

The Sequences’ emphasis on Bayes rule

Maybe I'm misremembering. But for me, the core Thing this part of the Sequences imparted was "intelligence, beliefs, information, etc - it's not arbitrary. It's lawful. It has structure. Here, take a look. Get a feel for what it means for those sorts of things to 'have structure, be lawful'. Bake it into your patterns of thought, that feeling."

If a bunch of people are instead taking away as the core Thing "you can do explicit calculations to update your beliefs" I would feel pretty sad about that, I think?

Have you tried getting feedback rather than getting feedback from high-status people?

"Do you have any tips on how to hug better?" 

Yes, I do. 

Report:

~"Not that I'm complaining, but why the hug?"

"Two reasons. One, I wanted to hug you. Two, I read a thing from Logan that included tips on how to hug."

"Well it was a very good hug."

I used: making sure to "be present" plus attending to whether I am avoiding things because when her arthritis is flaring, they might cause pain, even though right now her arthritis is not flaring. Hugging is common, but something about this hug did cause her to ask why, on this hug, specifically, when ordina... (read more)

I would not guess this. I would guess instead that the majority of the population has a few "symptoms". Probably we're in a moderate dimensional space, e.g. 12, and there is a large cluster of people near one end of all 12 spectrums (no/few symptoms), and another, smaller cluster near the other end of all 12 spectrums (many/severe symptoms) but even though we see those two clusters it's far more common to see "0% on 10, 20% on 1, 80% on 1" than "0% on all". See curse of dimensionality, probability concentrating in a shell around the individual dimension modes, etc.

i would hate pity answers like "not everyone needs to be smart"

the great majority of people who aren't "smart" also aren't "stupid"

and if you understood that without having to think about it much, I'm gonna guess you're one of the great majority

that wouldn't mean you're automatically "not stupid" enough to accomplish whatever you want to be "not stupid" enough to accomplish, of course, and trying to increase your cognitive capacity can still be good and helpful and etc, but if you are accidentally thinking "anyone scoring under about 108 on an IQ test is stupid", then managing to discard that bias might be helpful in its own right

One of the most valuable things I've contributed to my workplace is the institution of a set of 3 lightning talks every two weeks. Our data science team is about 30 people and we have a special Slack react that indicates "I want to hear about this in a lightning talk" and the organization is thus (usually) as easy as searching for all posts/comments with the react without the "I've already processed this lightning talk request", DMing the relevant person, and slotting them into the queue.

I wonder if there's some mutation of this plan that would be valuable... (read more)

Yeah I don't know how much time any of these would take compared to what was already done. Like is this 20% more work, or 100% more, or 500% more?

But good point: I listened to about a quarter, upped the speed to 1.5x, and stopped after about a half. When I decided to write feedback, I also decided I should listen to the rest, and did, but would not have otherwise. And, oddly enough, I think I may have been more likely to listen to the whole thing if I didn't have visuals, because I would have played it while gardening or whatever. :D

Did you previously know that

these things are quite common - if you just google for severance package standard terms, you'll find non-disparagement clauses in them

? I mean I agree(d, for a long time prior to any of all this) that these clauses are terrible for the ecosystem. But it feels like this should be like a vegan learning their associate eats meat and has just noticed that maybe that's problematic?

I think this is how your mind should have changed:

1. large update that companies in general are antagonists on a personal level (if you didn't already know th

Things I think would have improved this a lot, for me:

• a visual indicator of who was "speaking"; this could be as simple as a light gray box around the "speaker"
• significantly larger "inflection" in the voice. More dynamic range. More variance in loudness and pitch. I don't know how easy or hard this is to tune with the tools used, but the voices all felt much flatter than my brain wanted them to sound
• more visual going on in general; a scrolling transcipt on the right, maybe

(Note that there are people who do not enjoy board games. Actively do not enjoy. Dislike, even. This is fine - not every meetup appeals to every person. But also beware of treating these people as if they are just an ignorant shell around an inner person who would definitely enjoy board games if only they [x]. Some of them really are, some really aren't. Yes, even though "board games" is such a broad category. Yes, even though they seem to enjoy [other thing] which seems so similar. Etc.)

The newest versions come with ways to generate random rules. This brings the floor of the experience way up but also brings the ceiling down somewhat. "Oops I guess the rule I made was terrible" was a big problem with the original and newcomers.

I do my best to minimize switches from work to non-work "modes". When I am done with work for the day, I usually give myself a half hour to chill before switching to non-work.

I do not feel a need to talk about work. But some work anecdotes are still good for personal life, of course, and I do not censor them.

I actually feel... more intensely not like myself now, at work, than I used to, in some sense, because back in the major depression days I tried to feel as little as possible. Now I notice a lot more often when I'm doing things that "aren't me". So lik... (read more)

One of the most valuable things I have done, for myself, is to let as much of my personal life bleed into my work behaviors as I can, as you define them.

This could have backfired spectacularly. In some work cultures probably it would always backfire.

In mine, I:

• make 98%+ of my writing viewable to everyone at the company, and we're remote, so almost everything of importance makes it into writing
• never "try" to display an air of competency - trying to display an air of competency is one of the core behaviors that caused terrible feedback loops and major depres

I am quite sure that in a world where friendly tool AIs were provably easy to build and everyone was gonna build them instead of something else and the idea even made sense, basically a world where we know we don't need to be concerned about x-risk, Yudkowsky would be far less "relaxed" about AI+power. In absolute terms maybe he's just as concerned as everyone else about AI+power, but that concern is swamped by an even larger concern.

What convinced you that adversarial games between friends are more likely a priori? In my experience the vast majority of interactions between friends are cooperative, attempts at mutual benefit, etc. If a friend needs help, you do not say "how can I extract the most value from this", you say "let me help"*. Which I guess is what convinced me. And is also why I wrote "Maybe I'm bubbled though?" Is it really the case for you that you look upon people you think of as friends and say "ah, observe all the adversarial games"?

*Sure, over time, maybe you notice t... (read more)

No, that is a cooperative game that both participants are playing poorly.

I believe the common case of mutual "where do you want to go?" is motivated by not wanting to feel like you're imposing, not some kind of adversarial game.

Maybe I'm bubbled though?

Efficiency trades off with robustness.

If you, the listener/reader, fully understood what I tried to say, it is very very likely that you (specifically you) could have fully understood had I compressed my communication in some ways tailored to you.

collaborative truth-seeking doesn't exist. The people claiming to be collaborative truth-seekers are lying

Certainly if I wanted to do some collaborative truth-seeking I would choose a partner who believed collaborative truth-seeking existed.

If I didn't think the possibility for collaborative truth-seeking with a particular individual existed, I would be very tempted to instead just sling gotchas at them.

I tried code interpreter on some of the D&D.Sci challenges here. As expected, it failed miserably at generating any useful insights. It also had some egregious logic errors. I didn't, but should have, expected this.

For example on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2uNeYiXMs4aQ2hfx9/d-and-d-sci-5e-return-of-the-league-of-defenders the dataset is three columns of green team comp, three of blue team comp, and a win/loss result. To get an idea of which picks win against the known opponent team, it grabbed all games with that team participating, found the game... (read more)

https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2015/if-math-is-the-aspirin-then-how-do-you-create-the-headache/

Here is the most satisfying question I’ve asked about great lessons in the last year. It has led to some bonkers experiences with students and I want more.

• “If [x] is aspirin, then how do I create the headache?”

I’d like you to think of yourself for a moment not as a teacher or as an explainer or a caregiver though you are doubtlessly all of those things. Think of yourself as someone who sells aspirin. And realize that the best customer for your aspirin is someone who is

This story was co-written with GPT-4

Halfway through the first paragraph, I said, out loud, "this was written by ChatGPT". Do you know which bits of the first paragraph were by you vs auto-generated?