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All of Tiuto's Comments + Replies

Open Thread Winter 2024/2025
Tiuto10

Interesting. Do you have any recommendations on how to do this most effectively? At the moment I'm

  • using R to analyse the data/create some basic plots (will look into tigramite),
  • entering the data in google sheets,
  • occasionally doing a (blinded) RCT where I'm randomizing my dose of stimulants,
  • numerically tracking (guessing) mood and productivity,
  • and some things I mark as completed or not completed every day e.g. exercise, getting up early, remembering to floss

Questions I'd have:

  • Is google sheets good for something like this or are there better programs?
  • Any adv
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3niplav
As for data collection, I'm probably currently less efficient than I could be. The bets guide on how to collect data is imho Passive measures for lazy self-experimenters (troof, 2022), I'd add that wearables like FitBit allow for data exporting (thanks GDPR!). I've written a bit about how I collect data here, which involves a haphazard combination of dmenu pop-ups, smartphone apps, manually invoked scripts and spreadsheets converted to CSV. I've tried to err on the side of things that can automatically be collected, for anything that needs to be manually entered Google sheets is probably fine (though I don't use it because I like to stay without internet most of the time). As for blinding in RCTs[1], my process involves numbered envelopes containing both a pill and small piece of paper with a 'P' (placebo) or 'I' (intervention) written on it. Pills can be cut and put into pill capsules, sugar looks like a fine placebo. I don't have any great insight for what variables to track. I think from starting with the causal analysis I've updated towards tracking more "objective" measures (heart rate, sleeping times), and more things I can intervene on (though those usually have to be tracked manually). Hope this helps :-) ---------------------------------------- 1. I don't think anyone has written up in detail how to do these! I should do that. ↩︎
New LessWrong review winner UI ("The LeastWrong" section and full-art post pages)
Tiuto10

At the moment, a post is marked as "read" after just opening it. I understand it is useful not to have to mark every post as "I read this", but it makes it so that if I just look at a post for 10 seconds to see whether it interests me, it gets marked as read. I would prefer if one could change the settings to a "I have to mark posts as <read> manually" mode. With a small box at the bottom of a post, one can check.

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2habryka
Yeah, this is something I've been wanting for a while, but requires a bunch more engineering work to get accurate. I've been wanting something like "fullreads" for a while, or maybe "completion percentage" which we can use to assess what fraction of a post you actually read.  I think few people would want to mark all posts as read manually, but we could provide overrides, and improve our algorithms to get it right much more by default. 
Do websites and apps actually generally get worse after updates, or is it just an effect of the fear of change?
Answer by Tiuto*96

I think it's mostly that people complain when something gets worse but don't praise an update that improves the UX.


If a website or app gets made worse people get upset und complain, but if the UI gets improved people generally don't constantly praise the designers. A couple of people will probably comment on an improved design but not nearly as many as when the UI gets worse.
So whenever someone mentions a change it is almost always to complain.

If I just look at the Software I am using right now:

  • Windows 11 (seems better than e.g. Windows Vista)
  • Spotify (Don'
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6gwern
Spotify apparently had a really strange approach, which may explain the improvement: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/901p0j/former_software_engineer_at_spotify_on_their/ (but also helps exemplify my comment about how so many things are more important to fitness in market environments than design).
NYT on the Manifest forecasting conference
Tiuto41

Don't look at the comments of the article if you want to stay positive.

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The Kids are Not Okay
Tiuto10

I think this might play a really big role. I'm a teenager and I and all the people I knew during school were very political. At parties people would occasionally talk about politics, in school talking about politics was very common, people occasionally went to demonstrations together, during the EU Parlament election we had a school wide election to see how our school would have voted. Basically I think 95% of students, starting at about age 14, had some sort of Idea about politics most probably had one party they preferred.

We were probably most concerned ... (read more)

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1[anonymous]
I think it might be better to think of it this way. The increase in social media usage has changed people's cognition to a large extend that they are not aware of that exist not only just in politics but everything that has taken root in the collective consciousness. If only 20-30% of any individual's cognition is focused on the collective topics/consciousness before social media, then I'd say now it's flipped to 70-80%. We no longer have much free time and free thinking to ourselves these days. I've noticed this change not just in people whom I don't know but also in people I've known since growing up. They used to be different. The popularization of the zeitgeist has drawn those people in. They are tempted to participate, yet they are fully unaware of how participation has gradually changed their own cognitive habits. I was unaware for a long time, but when I decided that I probably need a break from all this stuff, I started looking for trends and started comparing how life was 10-20 years ago. What you spend time thinking about is subtly robbing you of time and opportunity to think about something else. What that something else is requires your own volition to explore and find out for yourself, instead of being pulled in all directions by the collective. The power of the human collective has never been stronger. This trend is led by celebrities and figureheads whom themselves are deeply entrenched in the collective consciousness more than most other participants. The sense of power they are experiencing is mesmerizing, thus leading to a form of addiction. It's both the technology itself and the convenience of participation. These two trends are reflective of the social model that came before: an increase in the public participation in everything that's larger than the life of an individual. There are cultural tendencies that shift out much this trend has permeated different societies, yet the overarching trend is there regardless of the degree of effect. I
Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won't kill everyone?
Tiuto-1-3

Deutsch has also written elsewhere about why he thinks AI doom is unlikely and I think his other arguments on this subject are more convincing. For me personally, he is who gives me the greatest sense of optimism for the future. Some of his strongest arguments are:

  1. The creation of knowledge is fundamentally unpredictable, so having strong probabilistic beliefs about the future is misguided (If the time horizon is long enough that new knowledge can be created, of course you can have predictions about the next 5 minutes). People are prone to extrapolate negat
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2TAG
But he offers no evidence.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
Tiuto20

10 years later and people are still writing funny coments here.

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Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle
Tiuto36

Isn't making your own bread really easy, you just need a bread maker put a bunch of ingredients in, press the button and wait. Seems like it might be worth a try. But obviously you know more about your situation than me.

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2juliawise
I don't know what the supposed changes in growing and processing wheat are, but a lot of that will presumably have happened by the stage it's flour. So doing the mixing and baking yourself might not change anything.
Gordon Seidoh Worley131

That it involves many more steps than put a thing in the microwave and pressing buttons means it's a cooking task I'm only going to perform for special occasions, if ever. I realize others like cooking a lot more and would love an excuse to "have to" make their own bread, but not me.

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AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Tiuto10

Hi, thanks for the advice.

Do you, or other people, know why your comment is getting downvoted? Right now it's at -5 so I have to assume the general LW audience disagrees with your advice. Presumably people think it is really hard to become a ML researcher? Or do they think we already have enough people in ML so we don't need more?

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AGI Safety FAQ / all-dumb-questions-allowed thread
Tiuto*70

I am interested in working on AI alignment but doubt I'm clever enough to make any meaningful contribution, so how hard is it to be able to work on AI alignment? I'm currently a high school student, so I could basically plan my whole life so that I end up a researcher or software engineer or something else. Alignment being very difficult, and very intelligent people already working on it, it seems like I would have to almost be some kind of math/computer/ML genius to help at all. I'm definitely above average, my IQ is like 121 (I know the limitations of IQ... (read more)

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1Yonatan Cale
I don't know, I'm replying here with my priors from software development.   TL;DR:  Do something that is  1. Mostly useful (software/ML/math/whatever are all great and there are others too, feel free to ask) 2. Where you have a good fit, so you'll enjoy and be curious about your work, and not burn out from frustration or because someone told you "you must take this specific job" 3. Get mentorship so that you'll learn quickly And this will almost certainly be useful somehow.   Main things my prior is based on: EA in general and AI Alignment specifically need lots of different "professions". We probably don't want everyone picking the number one profession and nobody doing anything else. We probably want each person doing whatever they're a good fit for. The amount we "need" is going up over time, not down, and I can imagine it going up much more, but can't really imagine it going down (so in other words, I mostly assume whatever we need today, which is quite a lot, will also be needed in a few years. So there will be lots of good options to pick)
-5Charbel-Raphaël