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All of Sqrt-1's Comments + Replies

The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
Sqrt-132

I do agree that a lot of seqeunces pages would benefit a lot from having discussion of previous work or at least stating what these ideas are called in the mainstream, but I feel Yudkowskys neologisms are just... better. Among the examples of similar concepts you mentioned, I definitely felt Yudkowsky was hinting at them with the whole dimensions thing, but I think "thingspace" is still a useful word and not even that complicated; if it was said in a conversation with someone familiar with ANNs I feel they would get what it meant. (Unlike a lot of other Yudkowskisms usually parroted around here, however...)

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Experiments as a Third Alternative
Sqrt-110

So... how did it go? Do you use the medications often now or not?

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3Adam Zerner
Update: I tried a few doses of Adderall, up to 15mg. I didn't notice anything.
3Adam Zerner
I'm in the process of being evaluated for ADHD. I was diagnosed with it as a kid, but that was over 20 years ago and the psychiatrist wanted me to be re-evaluated. It's taken a very long time to get an appointment and then go through the process, but hopefully I'm only a few weeks away now and will try to remember to report back!
Conservation of Expected Evidence
Sqrt-1-10

Criticism of this article was found at a talk page at RationalWiki.

The Sequences do not contain unique ideas, and they present the ideas they do contain in misleading ways using parochial language. The "Law of Conservation of Expected Confidence" essay, for instance, covers ideas that are often covered in introductory philosophical methods or critical thinking courses. There is no novelty either in the idea that your expected future credence must match your current credence (otherwise, why not update your credence now?), nor in the idea that if E is eviden

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1Very Wrong
I found this article because someone linked it to the all roads load to Rome (ARLR) fallacy [https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1dyuxtm/the_all_road_lead_to_rome_fallacy_is_better/], where there's no evidence that would reduce someone's confidence but there is evidence that would increase it. This commonly occurs with conspiracy theorists where an absence of evidence is evidence of a cover up. I think the article was a good pointer even if the point is kind of trivial. I still had to sit down and formally prove some of the authors conclusions, however. For example, P(H|E) > P(E) --> P(H|~E) < P(E) which more directly shows that a Bayesian reasoner can't fall for the ARLR fallacy. So I think the author could have said more with less. As a matter of fact, the quote you gave actually clarified some points for me.  I'd like to add that this article isn't clear about its normative commitments such as strong Bayesianism [that all valid inferences are Bayesian ones]. Given this article's place in The Sequences, it could prime readers to think strong Bayesianism is uncontroversial among other things. On a personal note, I'm in the camp that we have limited control over our beliefs [they are largely determined by the information we consume] and this supports my applied position that we should deliberately expose ourselves to confirmatory information until our credence's are at a prescribed level. This is to make the point that the author offers a certain theory of mind when they say "this realization can take quite a load off your mind". So you definitely aren't getting the same amount of neutrality as you would get from, say, SEP. However, I don't think this is as bad as quote guy makes it out to be if it's even bad? All that being said, I think quote guy is kind of missing the point. I don't think any blog about the basics of reasoning is going to introduce anything new and that wouldn't be covered in class [that's just beyond its scope]. So I think that criticism
The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
Sqrt-110

I found some criticism of this post on a RationalWiki talk page.

For another example, "Clusters in Thingspace" has a number of issues. Most simply, it seriously undersells Aristotle's ability to handle a nine-fingered person. Certainly, if you make 'has ten fingers' part of the definition of human, then you will be able to infer that a person without ten fingers is not a human; nobody, though, has ever seriously put forward such a proposal. For Aristotle's part, he would simply say that having a certain number of fingers is not an essential property of bein

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3Ben Winchester
I think there's some validity to this critique. I read The Cluster Structure of Thingspace (TCSOTS) and was asking myself "isn't this just talking about the problem of classification?" And classification definitely doesn't require us to treat 'birdness' or 'motherhood' as a discrete, as if a creature either has it or doesn't. Classification can be on a spectrum, with a score for 'birdness' or 'motherhood' that's a function of many properties.  I welcome (!!) making these concepts more accessible to those who are unfamiliar with them, and for that reason I really enjoyed TCSOTS.But it also seems like there'd also be a lot of utility in then tying these concepts to the fields of math/CS/philosophy that are already addressing these exact questions. These ideas presented in The Cluster of Thingspace are not new; not even a little - so why not use them as a jumping-off-point for the broader literature on these subjects, to show how researchers in the field have approached these issues, and the solutions they've managed to come up with?  See: Fuzzy Math, Support Vector Machines, ANNs, Decision Trees, etc.  So: I think posts like this would have a stronger impact if tied into the broader literature that already covers the same subjects. The reader who started the article unfamiliar with the subject would, at the end, have a stronger idea of where the field stands, and they would also be better resourced for further exploring the subject on their own.  Note: this is probably also why most scientific papers start with a discussion of previous related work. 
2lesswronguser123
Most of this just seems to be nitpicking lack of specificity of implicit assumptions which were self-evident (to me), the criticism regarding "blue" pretty much depends on whether the html blue also needs an interpreter(Eg;human brain) to extract the information.  The lack of formality seems (to me as a new user) a repeated criticism of the sequences but, I thought that was also a self-evident assumption (maybe I'm just falling prey to the expecting short inferential distance bias) I think Eliezer has mentioned 16 years ago here: "This blog is directed at a wider audience at least half the time, according to its policy. I'm not sure how else you think this post should have been written."    I personally find sequences to be useful aggregator of various ideas I seem to find intriguing at the moment...
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
Sqrt-110

Thought I should put this here to get more attention but this specific article of Scott Alexander's was criticised in a blog here.

https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method

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2023 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
Sqrt-190

Completed my first LessWrong survey! I liked the several questions that tried to sort out all the lizardmen.

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Chapter 107: The Truth, Pt 4
Sqrt-131

I wonder if protection from dementors is the only reason Voldemort brought Potter with him?

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Chapter 106: The Truth, Pt 3
Sqrt-130

why does professor quirrell have a gun; like, doesn't he have a wand—

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8Jay Bailey
Earlier in the book it's shown that Quirrell and Harry can't cast spells on each other without backlash. I'm sure Quirrell could get around that by, e.g, crushing him with something heavy, but why do something complicated, slow, and unnecessary when you can just pull a trigger?
Chapter 8: Positive Bias
Sqrt-120

I believe that the test is hard because of the fact that the pattern involves increasing numbers, not decreasing. I feel that our brains are just primed for increasing numbers since childhood, like if the pattern was decreasing numbers, most people would say "1,2,3" and immediately solve it.

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