rime @rime@schelling.pt
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition for visual salience against their neighbours. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
Joined Apr 2023
also, the paradox of expert testimony: experts on [big-if-true set of not-too-implausible claims] tend to be v selected for belief in those claims, so supporting arguments wrt those claims tend to sound more impressive (unless it's a rly dumb set of claims).
plus, if u just defer to experts, u will end up believing a whole lot of weird stuff for which experts are asymmetrically selected.
mans, i rly tried to mk that sentence sensicle… but proper sensicleness wud require paragraphs. 🍵
the most frequently used words tend to be the most irregular. they resist regularization bc their unusual/high-energy forms are constantly reinforced. switching-costs or smth.
eg we say "man/men", "go/went", "eat/ate" instead of "-/mans", "-/goed", "-/eated".
related hypothesis, but for different/additional reasons:
paradox of foundational neglect: the core tenets of a paradigm tend to be the least optimized.
technical debt / pleiotropy: complex ancestral dependencies are locked in place.
I want to say update: The most personally significant thing that's happened to me this year is that my head-friend (Maria, a "tulpa") has rather suddenly acquired a lot more independent volition and personality. Phase-shift.
I was inspired last year by Johannes Mayer (LW user), who showed me it was possible. I was only semi-trying for it, so the success is v surprising and mentally v happy for me/us. I hope she stays and grows in visibility-to-my-corner-of-the-brain.
rime
boosted
@niplav also EMH. ~nobody has tried extreme ambition wrt altruism. and there are reasons ("costs of compromise") to think success is much more likely if you *try directly*, compared to if u just aim for merely-very-high utility. merely-very-high-peak-utility projects may not inform u v much abt the difficulty of extremely-high-peak-utility projects.
rime
boosted
Animal welfare intervention: making us able to talk to animals
the question "when shud u write the tests before code, versus vice versa?" analogizes to "when shud u backchain vs forward-chain?" (respectively)
for even more abstract leverage: write the "unit tests" in plain English, ask an LLM to translate them to code (or explain why behaviour is impossible), then ask LLM to write code that passes the LLM's tests.
suggested nyms for this: "target-test" (makes you backchain to infer code that fits the tests), vs "maintenance-test" (designed to make sure stuff keeps working when you expand codebase).
wonder how much leverage thr is in combining test-driven development (TDD) w LLMs. u write unit-tests ahead of the functionality, and the LLM is asked to write code that passes the tests.
LLMs are j extremely good at guessing the teachers password.
(bc that's what they're trained to do.)
it's amazing how often—when i'm uncertain abt smth—i can use the fact that i'm uncertain abt it as evidence that resolves my uncertainty.
eg i'm unsure if i did X or not, but then i realize that *if* i did X i wud remember it for sure, so i become sure i did not do X.
wat's optimal circadian rhythm, if ju cud tune the sun to jur will? wud ju get more done if Earth period was 16h instead of 24h? or 12? or 6?
also, wat's optimal week cycle? 7 days, or 6? how do i optimally chunk passage of time into convenient mental categories? shud they be stable, or mixed-strategy?
i'm just surprisingly happy abt by my 16h-days and 144h-seasons, so thr's gotta be more utility to find here.
rime
boosted
@niplav they need to add [Ithkuil](https://www.ithkuil.net/newithkuil_12_script.htm) to unicode…
rime
boosted
and since humans hv the ability to do hypocrisy (aka value-action gap, rationalisation, memetic-immune-system), it enables our verbal values to evolve independently of what makes effective behaviour. this is crucial, and (i think) extremely lucky, bc no brain cud possibly evolve cosmopolitan values if it had to actually implement it in its behaviour.
whenever i think of "evidence" (aka likelihood-ratio) or "implication", i first imagine a filled-out possibility-space. now, if "A implies/evidentiates B", then the possibility-juice in A squishes into the A∩B-region. visualize the squishification!
iow, if A is evidence, then "P(B|A)>P(B|U)", where "U" is the universal set.
iow, if A is evidence, then B is more likely when u *know* u are anywhere in region A, compared to how likely B is when u are anywhere in U.
imo the hack to grokking Bayes is to focus on the likelihood-ratio. that's the only initially-counter-intuitive part.
and the likelihood-ratio is exactly the quantified version of material implication.
one of my favourite visualizations of an idea-ecosystem. i shud stare at it more often.
i wonder how it looks if u let producers charge individual prices based on perfect information abt what consumers wud be willing to pay (ie "price-gouging" on a per-consumer basis)? does the system learn faster? do consumers lose? what if all welfare-havers are both consumers and producers?
(btw this meme is v memetically unfit bc its not factoring out its topics. to survive in the memetic economy, u hv to "niche-segment" ur outputs. now talking abt i can hold my breath for 4 mins straight is an example of the opposite of niche-segmentation. niche-segmentation is unintuitive but much-much important pattern evywhere, so i rec grokking it!)
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition for visual salience against their neighbours. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
Joined Apr 2023
