DiasporaMap-Talk . . . July 01, 2020, at 08:34 PM by ?: Comment added
DiasporaMap . . . June 24, 2020, at 03:28 AM by achmizs: [:attachcsv https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1EgqL7fpPtxnaasCtDYi5BUdA9gad7S0JebeQKBO8zsY/export?format=csv&id=1EgqL7fpPtxnaasCtDYi5BUdA9gad7S0JebeQKBO8zsY&gid=0'class=blog-table':]
HomePage . . . February 27, 2020, at 05:21 PM by namespace: Add COVID-19 FAQ
Heuristics . . . December 28, 2018, at 03:53 AM by namespace: * The ideal state is neither totally worldly or totally enlightened, but a superposition of the two in which one is both alive and dead at the same time.
ThielianSecrets . . . March 29, 2018, at 08:54 PM by namespace: It's taken an uncomfortably long time for people to notice that Facebook is poison. Of course, [[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ | any savvy technologist has known for years that Facebook was bad news]]. I'm sure some of my readers are crowing right now about their vindicated prophet status. But don't pat yourself on the back too hard, I bet most of you still signed up [[http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/facebook-tells-you-when-youre-in-photos-but-not-tagged.html | and ratted out your more prudent friends who didn't]]. Of course, the signs have been there. [[https://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-technology-security-10-privacy.html | Facebook and Google made it clear they think 'privacy is dead' in 2010]]. [[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10932534/Facebook-conducted-secret-psychology-experiment-on-users-emotions.html | There was that time Facebook silently performed a psychology experiment to see how much they can impact your mood by rigging your feed]]. [[https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-psychology-of-facebook-depression-avoid-social-comparisons-envy/ | Then there were the apologetics over studies showing that Facebook leads to mental health issues]], to which the solution is apparently more vigorous Facebook use. In 2017 the dam broke and we got a slew of articles about the dangers of Facebook. [[https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/09/sean-parker-facebook-exploits-human-psychology/ | Sean Parker admitted the whole thing was designed to steal your life]], which should have already been innately obvious to people yet somehow wasn't. [[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ | Then Jean Twenge and others reminded us to think of the children]]. [[https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ENBzEkoyvdakz4w5d/out-to-get-you | Our resident Zvi pointed out]] that you know, ''maybe it's bad'' to centralize your communications on a service that doesn't even ensure when you send a mailing it actually gets delivered. The latest pile that Facebook has stepped in of course, has been [[http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-data-scandal-explainer/index.html | their daft handling of accidentally leaking 50 million people's data to Cambridge Analytica]]. Since this event helped one of the most reviled political figures in recent history come to power, it's a revelation that's attracted a feeding frenzy from newspapers, but not necessarily the public. As far as I can tell, 'rationalists' are still using Facebook for their most important informal conversations.
BookReviewLawrencePrincipesSecretsOfAlchemy . . . January 21, 2018, at 01:54 PM by namespace: One of the odder episodes in the history of alchemy comes to us from its development in Arabia. There, a group of alchemists writing under the name of Jābir ibn Hayyān developed a theoretical foundation for alchemy which would strike modern readers as quite bizarre. In it they propose first that the metals are compositions of four qualities: hot, cold, wet, and dry. To determine the exact composition of these qualities in a metal, an alchemist is instructed to do the following. First, these four qualities are placed on a grid, with a 'semiquantitative' scale of their degree of presence in a particular metal. Then, Pythagorean numerology is used to determine that things corresponding to seventeen will predict the nature of reality. This is used to form the size of the grid, along with other details. Once the alchemist has the grid, they use an algorithm to place the syllables of Arabic words for metals onto it. Another algorithm converts the grid into the specific weights of the metals. Ostensibly, this might seem ''completely insane''. However, Principe provides further details and context which make it less obscure. Essentially, the Pythagorean numerology might be thought of as a universal prior. The Arabic words come into the picture because in the Islamic mythic tradition, the Arabic language is given to Muslims by Allah. This would make the Arabic names for metals ''god's names for them'', and they thus probably reflect some sort of fundamental properties. In essence these alchemists are attempting a side channel attack on god's dictionary. We can safely assume however that this methodology, while clever, did not achieve the stone. It does however demonstrate some of the way pre-modern people thought about the world they inhabited. In the present day we are used to the notion that a divine revelation is an exceptional, mystical experience that happens only for a select few. (And that's if you believe in divine revelation at all.) Here Starkey records this as something no more unexpected than any other successful result of his research. What's going on? Principe explains that in the early modern period, Europeans conceived of the world as being deeply layered and connected by god's authorship. All knowledge was a gift of god, in the literal sense. Even if knowledge came through an intermediary, such as a book, teacher, or observation of the natural world, that knowledge originated from god. It was quite common to publish texts whose purpose was for educated readers to find connections, either as a personal pursuit or in periodicals which collected and published the best interpretations from readers. To the pre-modern and early-modern mind, metaphors and analogies, which we conceive as the product of human pattern matching, were part of the territory itself rather than the map. Such abstract connections were a method of examining the underlying architecture of god's creation. Another criticism from ibn-Khaldun is that chrysopoeia must be impossible, as its possibility would foil god's plan to have balanced economies by making a limited amount of gold and silver.
Untitled . . . January 16, 2018, at 08:27 PM by Erasmus: Paths are walked one foot after the other, by careful repetition. Crossbow is closer to Mars than pen. Zeno's wisdom of measurement must be considered carefully to achieve Erasmus's glory. The artists thieving eyes permit no wasted motion. All the world is stolen by their dedication. It is easy to confuse that which is stolen with that which New Caledonia's cartographer made, in telling the difference you'll map while you travel and cut with no blade.
AgainstNumerology . . . January 13, 2018, at 02:53 AM by namespace: In addition to the absent evidence for particular effectiveness from deep consideration of Bayesian Statistics, there is in fact evidence of absence. As Philip Tetlock explains in ''Superforecasting'', a book profiling the methods of people who outperform the prediction abilities of intelligence agencies using only open-source intelligence, Bayes Theorem isn't a huge feature of successful forecasters. In fact, Tetlock takes the reader aside for a bit of myth busting, stating explicitly that Bayes Theorem is not necessary for the level of ability superforecasters demonstrate:
ToolSkillsAndPersonaSkills . . . January 02, 2018, at 10:38 PM by namespace: !! Compatibility Of Patches On The Soul If you'll permit me a bit of speculation, I think another thing that might distinguish persona skills is that you can only have so many at once. Because of their nature as essentially patches on the soul to achieve excellence, it's quite possible that there are harmful interactions which can occur from incompatible or conflicting changes. Two persona skills that work great individually, might be at odds when they occur together in the same person. Certainly many fields of endeavor find 'training issues' with people that have already learned a different mindset. Lawyers are famously cranky about the way programmers interpret law, 'humanities people' and 'STEM people' love to rant about how the other group just doesn't get it. I would not be surprised if underlying a lot of these conflicts are deep persona skills whose learnability is partially path dependent on which you do first. [^#1 In the 'humanities versus STEM' case I think the historical example of polymaths like Leonardo Da Vinci might be misleading, as art used to be a common way for naturalists to express their observations about the world. With the invention of photography this skill of illustration is less critically important than it once was.^] [^@^]
TechniqueSuggestions . . . January 02, 2018, at 03:10 AM by namespace: Go to the talk page and suggest stuff. !! How It Works * We all put anything that comes to mind as a suggestion for a 'rationality technique' into the talk page comment box. * Once we get a ton of suggestions, I load them all into a Discord bot or something and a handful of us vote on their rank in comparison to other things. The bot implements an algorithm like that one chess-ranking one to compare the 'strength' of different items. * This should get faster and faster over time, so that eventually we essentially have an O(log n) algorithm for classifying new items as a group.
HowIThink . . . December 29, 2017, at 08:17 PM by namespace: Add Heuristics
DiasporaMap-Test . . . December 27, 2017, at 02:55 AM by Obormot: %block gdoc-edit-link gdoc-done-editing% [[{$FullName}?csvinclude_clear_cache=1#adjacent_blogs | Done editing]] %block gdoc-edit-link gdoc-done-editing% [[{$FullName}?csvinclude_clear_cache=1#tumblrs | Done editing]] %block gdoc-edit-link gdoc-done-editing% [[{$FullName}?csvinclude_clear_cache=1#forums | Done editing]] %block gdoc-edit-link gdoc-done-editing% [[{$FullName}?csvinclude_clear_cache=1#chatrooms | Done editing]]
RealTimeMinuteTimePomodoroTime . . . December 16, 2017, at 12:26 AM by namespace: Human reaction time, the timescale on which we take our moment to moment perception of reality, [[https://www.pubnub.com/blog/2015-02-09-how-fast-is-realtime-human-perception-and-technology/ | is usually about a quarter of a second]]. These quarter seconds are what we might think of as ''real time'', the basic chronology on which all people operate at all times. However planning into the future requires us to think in a way that is alien to this basic experience. The problem is perhaps best illustrated by considering the nature of our own native chronology. In the 250 miliseconds that a human being perceives as basic reality, many things happen. For example, just staring at this page on any modern computer from one second to the next fails to disclose the couple billion machine cycles that elapsed. Nor is it obvious to your perception that the screen is constantly refreshing its image to provide the illusion of motion, it simply works faster than you can process. But imagine your reaction time, your ''real time'' were 100 times faster, two and a half miliseconds per moment of experience. Depending on the refresh rate of your monitor, you [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_(screen) | would have severe flicker]]. A bullet that previously traveled ten meters in 312ms, just barely above the threshold of a single instant of human perception, now takes a visible 124.8 units of perception.
ContactMe . . . December 15, 2017, at 03:35 AM by namespace: mailto:jd@fortforecast.com
DiasporaMap-Archive . . . December 09, 2017, at 02:46 PM by Obormot: Page renamed to Main.DiasporaMap-Archive from Main.DiasporaMap
DiasporaMap-Alternate . . . December 09, 2017, at 02:45 PM by Obormot: %newwin% [[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H8VzbmIkvTzibjyKBIGvujDc5PWpi4_ax9PLKNhYljw/edit#gid=0 | View or edit this table on Google Docs]] %% [:attachcsv https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1H8VzbmIkvTzibjyKBIGvujDc5PWpi4_ax9PLKNhYljw/export?format=csv&id=1H8VzbmIkvTzibjyKBIGvujDc5PWpi4_ax9PLKNhYljw&gid=0'class=chatroom-table':]
GrowthAndDecay . . . November 27, 2017, at 03:13 AM by namespace: An interesting property of our world is that stagnation, isn't. Things which aren't decaying are generally growing, and things which aren't growing are generally decaying. The point between the two exists, but it's a rarer property than I think we assume. For group effort this has the consequence that 'good enough', isn't. Consider for example a team that puts in 99% of the necessary effort towards a goal. Their output is basically as good, but very subtly missing the final polish they'd need for meeting expectations. The problem is that thanks to normalization, [[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_and_the_normalization_of_deviance | this outcome will become the expected way of things]]. Once that happens you'll start getting 99% of 99%, or 98%. Then 99% of 98%, and so on. Subtly at first, and then more apparent as time goes on your performance begins to seriously deteriorate. As a consequence it's important to always try and meet expectations in pursuit of a goal. Fortuitously however, extra effort is similarly rewarded. A team that always goes a little farther, to say 101% of their original objective will find over time that they're much more than 101% better at things than others. One consequence of this is that even small improvements can make a very big difference if they compound. You shouldn't ignore things with small effect sizes if larger effects aren't available.
HeroLicensingBureau . . . November 21, 2017, at 03:26 AM by namespace: (:htoc:) !! Introduction !! Hero License As Costly Signaling To Bypass The Human Spam Filter As it turns out, there are perfectly sane reasons to ask to see someones 'hero license' besides skepticism about how much status they should be after. I think probably the most common is to see how much effort someone has put into justifying the soundness of a course of action. This is the sort of thing that works best with an example, so unfortunately for this next section I'll be picking on some people. !!! A Tale Of Two Proposals
Rarities . . . November 16, 2017, at 02:59 AM by namespace: (:head:) Why
XeroxGuy2014 . . . November 07, 2017, at 07:47 PM by namespace: >>talkpageheader<< %center%'''Epistemic Status''' This is literally like, a quarter finished thing from my miscellaneous text files. Don't expect total coherence. >><<
ImmaculateATextualRepresentationOfLogicalArguments2015 . . . November 07, 2017, at 07:46 PM by namespace: %center% '''Epistemic Status''' I wrote this in a retarded non-obvious way after huffing too many paint fumes or something, please don't judge me as being ordinarily this pretentious if this is your first exposure to my writing.
GroupHeader . . . November 07, 2017, at 06:27 PM by namespace: (:robots noindex,follow:) (:include Site.Banners:)
Essays . . . October 31, 2017, at 03:57 AM by namespace: Page moved to Main.EssaysAndIdeas
SuperforecastingNotes . . . October 31, 2017, at 02:22 AM by namespace: !! 4) Superforecasters !! 5) Supersmart? !! 6) Superquants? !! 7) Supernewsjunkies? !! 8) Perpetual Beta
BookNotes . . . October 31, 2017, at 02:21 AM by namespace: [[Superforecasting Notes]]
DavidsToe . . . October 26, 2017, at 10:15 PM by namespace: (:title David's Toe:)
ListOfTrustAndCuriosityExploits . . . October 26, 2017, at 03:02 PM by Hypothesis: (:cell:) Many, often through one form or another of [[https://www.social-engineer.org/framework/influencing-others/pretexting/ | ''pretexting'']]. [[https://hivewired.wordpress.com/abstractweapons/ | More detailed explanation of sorts here ]]. Tuxedage [[https://tuxedage.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/the-ai-box-experiment-victory/ | all but admits this is how he won the AI box]].
IncludePrivateMessaging . . . October 19, 2017, at 11:33 PM by Hypothesis: As I tally the communities I still belong to, I realize that a very large chunk of them are things I would have moved on from ages ago except that I have a personal connection with other members. This connection isn't with all the members, in fact quite often it's only a handful of people that connect me to the group. It might sound like a paradox, but a necessary precondition is that I need to be able to communicate with these members outside of the normal group conversation mode. How it actually goes in practice is that these people are part of the group, so I feel obligated to maintain connection with the group so I'm exposed to that part of them, even if it's merely tangential. As a consequence, one of the things which promotes long term user retention is making sure the tools are in place for people to develop those 1:1 connections with each other. Ideally, those aren't the only thing keeping people around but rather roots underlying a healthy vibrant plant. During the dry season though, those ties are what save you. I've known sites that went through utter dark ages but held on because the last users liked each other too much to leave even when it got tough.
ConfessionsOfAHappyHacker . . . October 18, 2017, at 12:47 AM by Hypothesis: Soon after that, I developed into one of the unauthorized but tolerated "random people" hanging around the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A random hacker is to a computer laboratory much as a groupie is to a rock band: not really doing useful work, but emotionally involved and contributing to the ''ambiance'', if nothing else. After a while, I was haunting the computer rooms at off-hours, talking to people but more often looking for chances to run programs. Sometimes "randoms" such as I were quite helpful, operating the computers for no pay and giving advice to college students who were having trouble. Sometimes, however, we were quite a nuisance. Once, I was ejected from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by none other than Richard Greenblatt, the very famous hacker who wrote the MacHack program with whic the PDP-7 had won its chess trophies. He threw me out because I was monopolizing the one terminal that produced letter-quality copy. (I was using the computer to write "personalized" form letters to various computer manufacturers, asking for machine manuals.) I deserved to be tossed out, and gave him no argument. But when you're hooked, you're hooked, and I was undaunted: within a week or two I was back again. Eventually I got a part-time job as a programmer at MIT's Project MAC computer laboratory. There I became a full-pledged member of the hacker community, and ultimately an MIT graduate student. I was never a lone hacker, but one of many. Despite stories you may have read about anti-social nerds glued permanently to display screens, totally addicted to the computer, hackers have (human) friends too. Often these friendships are formed and maintained through the computer. At one time, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had one common telephone number, extension 6765, and a public-address system. The phone was answered "six-seven-six-five," or sometimes "Fibonacci of twenty," since, as mathematicians know, 6765 is the twentieth Fibonacci number. Through this number and the public-address system, it was easy to call and reach anyone and everyone. In particular, one could easily ask, "Who wants to go for Chinese food?" and get ten or fifteen people for an expedition. "Unfortunately," says MIT hacker Richard Stallman, "most of the people and terminals have moved to other floors, where the 6765 number does not reach. The ninth floor, the lab's ancient heart, is becoming totally filled with machines, leaving no room for people, who must move to other floors. Now I can't even call up and find out if anyone is hungry."
ComputerCults . . . October 18, 2017, at 12:05 AM by Hypothesis: About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. "It was a whole subculture. It's been popularized now, but it was asecret cult in my days," said Alsing."The game of programming -- and it is a game -- was so fascinating. We'd stay up all nigth and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think." A few of his fellow mighnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night. Some started sleeping days and missed all their classes, thereby ruining their grades. Alsing and a few others flunked out of school. "] Steele, Guy. The Hacker's Dictionary: a Guide to the World of Wizzards. Harper & Row, 1983.
80k . . . October 17, 2017, at 03:41 AM by Hypothesis: Money remaining: 61,800
InsightPornIsRelative . . . October 16, 2017, at 12:46 PM by Hypothesis: [[http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html | In one of Sister Y's best essays]] she writes about the concept of 'insight porn'. Insight porn is never really defined except by example, and there it seems to mean something like 'media which is rich in providing the feeling of insight'. This almost seems like a waste of the term to me, since we have a word that means that already it's called insightful. Rather I would define insight porn in perhaps the same way you might define porn itself. Porn is sexuality without sex. Insight porn then, is mapmaking without the territory. Things which aren't in your environment are things which aren't assailable through empiricism. A necessary consequence of this definition is that ''insight porn is relative''! A brief example might be waste management. If I read a textbook on waste management and begin teaching myself how you build a municipal sewage treatment plant, that's pure entertainment for me. I'm never going to have to model a waste treatment plant, let alone ''build one''. By contrast, for a waste manager that's his '''job'''. He'll read that same book and be able to point out flaws, treasure the particularly valuable information, and overall be able to relate its contents to his life in a concrete way that I just couldn't. To me reading that textbook is mapmaking without the territory, to him it's some of the most valuable mapmaking of all, directly relating in a rare and valuable way to his daily experience. Sister Y conceives of 'insight porn' as being an objective quality of something, which I think is only half true. There are some things which nobody has access to territory to compare against. For example most Science Fiction, the frontiers of physics, theology, weird thought experiments, certain kinds of historical speculation. These are always insight porn. But for everything and everyone else it really is situational.
NamedAndUnnamedRoles . . . October 15, 2017, at 05:54 PM by Hypothesis: Markets need a certain amount of legibility to operate well. For example, currencies are a legible trustworthy store of value by which all other things can be measured, which makes market transaction much easier than barter where the cost of goods being traded fluctuates often enough that it's not really possible to easily keep in mind how much value is being traded. This can be a problem for certain types of people because there exist certain roles in society which are hugely important and contribute a lot of value, but don't have names, or are misleadingly named. For example, one role that usually doesn't have a name is 'person that makes illegible things legible'. This role certainly exists however and comes in many guises. A good legislator for example has to figure out how to model reality and make it lay down in the right ways for their regulation to work. An investment bankers job is to figure out the true economic value of things and contribute to the process that gives them a clear determination of value. The reason why this is problematic for some people is that if The Thing They Do is unnamed, or has been cleaved at the joints of reality poorly by a template they don't fit into, then the market can't really find a good value for it. Especially in large organizations where ideally every person should be replaceable, unique illegible individuals who contribute lots of value are an existential risk because it's not clear where you go to get another one if the one you have disappears. For this reason such people often end up as founders. Steve Jobs is one example. It's difficult to say exactly what it is Steve Jobs did, yes he's a CEO, but he's also a human computer interaction specialist, and a manager, and some other things besides. The problem is that when Steve Jobs died, investors in Apple weren't exactly sure where they would find a replacement, if it's even ''possible in principle to find a replacement''. Once you define the essence of a role and can start typing people into it, then you can begin to screen and train people for that role and thereby provide massive value by duplicating what would otherwise be a one-off high value contributor. The process by which the original person who becomes a template for these roles is developed remains somewhat mysterious to me, and I think merits investigation.
Protest . . . October 14, 2017, at 07:55 PM by Hypothesis: George Von Rauch, ''A history of Soviet Russia, Fifth Revised Edition, 1967''
HNUpvotes . . . October 10, 2017, at 09:29 PM by Said Achmiz: (:sortable:) [:attachcsv 2017_10_09_stories_dump.csv'class=sortable id=hn-upvote-table':]
Bookshelf . . . October 08, 2017, at 06:46 PM by Said Achmiz: #wikitext table tr:first-of-type { font-weight: bold; white-space: nowrap; }
InTheAppropriateFormat . . . October 06, 2017, at 03:39 PM by namespace: [@ (:cell:) Link to a good example post from that blog @]
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