All of Swerve's Comments + Replies

The first paragraphs of the "Backwards Chaining" section of the post is exactly the place where abstract instructions can be helpful, but concrete step-by-step instructions of the technique are arguably even more important for learning to do the thing in the first place. You appear to attempt to ameliorate this by including examples of things you could apply this to. However I think [93%] this isn't as helpful as walkthroughs of the technique imo.

For example, you could include examples of problems you had to solve, and used this technique o... (read more)

I'm the reader who wrote the quoted piece under the "STORIES" tab on TYMC. I've been tuning every day for about a month and a half. I didn't get a huge amount object level value (tension and stress reduction) from TYMC, probably because I already maintained a pretty low baseline stress and tension levels. But nonetheless I got a lot of meta-value from learning, and found the instructions pretty straightforward to do. I'm wondering what you think needs more clarification or detail, and I'd love to help you figure the skill... (read more)

These essays had a pretty large impact on how I go about learning mathematics, I always had an easier time when formulas or arguments could be mapped onto visual structure. In-fact, before writing this comment (and in general when constructing arguments) I imagined a mind map containing all the relevant ideas and relations I wanted to portray. I am now (somewhat poorly) attempting to translate my 3-D visual argument into a linear verbal one.

Something else to be noted is visual reasoning and complementary cognitive artifacts seem to go hand in hand. Consid... (read more)

I'm a math/econ undergrad, I've found that using geometry and imagery to contextualize all my classes is the easiest way for me to really understand a subject.

To use a small example: Learning things like the chain rule or the product rule in calculus became trivial once I learned via this method. However, that is not a way of teaching that is present where I'm learning. I've had little (but not zero) success in finding resources on my own that choose to communicate ideas in this way. Or help me hone my visual-math reasoning skills (1 2... (read more)

Most important idea huh?

Here goes nothin'..

I think that while the community in general has a large amount of declarative information. A very small amount of it is actually put into procedural format. We have repertoires of information and expertise, we can do some really cool things with our minds when we properly use them. However, we are missing a curriculum. We are missing a centralized place where a repository of literally all the most useful information lies. We have no textbook. We have pieces like Hammertime which try to amend some of this wi... (read more)

Before anything else, thank you for the small piece about "adjusting your seat". It's taken a considerable amount of pressure/dread off of doing Hammertime.

Anyway,

It seems like the heart of the bug hunting skill, is having enough gears in your understanding of a certain domain. Such that you can find specific faults, inefficiencies, and leverage points to address. The inclination to go meta with the domain is also very helpful.

For example, in my own practice of bug hunt, I initially found myself selecting things I was explicitly doing wrong... (read more)

After thinking about your reply for a while, you've made me update strongly towards believing that I had overestimated my own efficacy. In particular:

I've been reading LW for about five years and "knew" about most of these tools abstractly without ever getting anything practical out of it. You can check the comments to Hammers and Nailsand extrapolate that even longtime LWers have each only practiced only 5% of all the techniques we have, and that 5% varies wildly from person to person. It's not clear if what I've written so

My gut reaction told me that I hadn't gone through the experience of the uncanny valley. After a minute of thought, I realized that there was a period of four months last year where I divebombed in grades and class engagement. It was contextually because I had just learned about the diaspora and was rabbit-holing everything related to the disparate rationality blog. I was also rereading HPMoR. I think the historic reason for my failure was two-fold. The realization that the community wasn't dead and I wasn't alone; and the overemphasis the s... (read more)

Considering the amount of engagement and positive anecdotes people are putting into this; It appears to me to be evidence that writing things down (in some format) is really helpful. As in, helpful enough that if you are not already writing down your thoughts and ideas you should at the very least take five and come up with an easy way to try it out. This is one of those things that's extremely low cost, with a lot of benefit. Please take the low-hanging fruit.

One more anecdote for the pile: I found carrying and using paper very unwieldy for a long ti... (read more)

Putting all of my TAPS on post it notes on my wall so I see them when I wake up. This should make a good trigger for keeping them in mind during the day. It also gives some potentially free utility over time in the form of "see that wall? All those notes are different habits I was able to cultivate".

Uh oh. My first run-through yielded only 11 bugs. Considering I'm not hilariously successful at everything means I'm missing a ton of information. My second search yielded a total of 50 bugs. This is still only half of what you minimally requested. I'm glad this was brought to my attention as it's a really glaring deficiency, however I'm not sure how to go about remedying this, as it feels like I wrote down everything I could reasonably come up with (and I still ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas).

Also something ... (read more)

The simple explaination makes sense. However I'm sure there's a lot more to this than the is conveyed in one-sentence. I'd really like to get my hands on a more in-depth explaination if it's possible. A google search of the term "Fermi Modeling" as well as searching your LW post history has not yielded anything. Is there a post somewhere I can read?

Wow this was a lot harder than I expected. I thought about my favorite technique for a solid fifteen minutes before deciding on this. Mostly because I realized that I don't have explicit techniques that I usually use. I definitely use certain things like Immunity to Change Mapping, the Ideological Turing Test, and Neutral Hours. However I think (78%) the majority of the benefit I've gained from rationality lies in a single hammer, or the ability to update from evidence and think about the best option in a scenario. This mostly happens on the 5-se... (read more)

Lo and behold my pleasure at seeing something that's been swimming around in the back of my head for at least a month put out in excellent writing. I found this post valuable for several reasons:

1.) This describes what may be an extremely worthwhile meta-skill. The whole sentiment of "take an idea seriously" seems to have a lot of recursive power. As one takes the singularity mindset seriously, they are in-fact practicing the singularity mindset. This not only gives itself a positive feedback loop, but allows other potentially helpful concep... (read more)