I always forget that I can take a painkiller until after I've already spent half a day pointlessly miserable.
How do I get back on the streams wagon
bf: what if the doctor made a nomu with all-for-one's quirk me: this can only end well 😊
fr tho, the purpose of those family photos was never lost—it's just sad AF. egotistic and poorly executed
I'm gonna try using this again
always hated family photos. it tasted of lost purposes in my family. too posed to feel like a memento of the moment, not posed enough to feel like we were painting a portrait to display with pride.
Actual reasons to take photos:
- high bandwidth data logging. if you ever want a bunch of time series data on the people you know, for medical research or social studies probably, photos are straight up a window into the past. Best taken at true-randomly distributed intervals, with regular periodic as next best.
- to trigger in-depth recall. this is also served by souvenirs, smells especially are really powerful. I want to have a ~scrapbook that helps me move along a chronology of my life. And a section that is about importance, where I keep reminders of things I want to keep salient. Remembering the bedrocks of relationships, identity.
(wow, I kept this in draft for ages)
mental handles I use a lot but haven’t translated for casual communication:
- People’s expert intuition, generalized as them having an subnetwork that has fine-trained on a particular kind of data.
- Approximating real things as simple math/logic, with a modelable AMOUNT or KIND of divergence from the real values. I visualize this as the Area between two function curves.
- The idea that many models will behave functionally identically over restricted DOMAIN, and only diverge in the extrema or in less common cases. I may not know what the real function is, but I can point at the tight convergence of predictions as a pseudo-function that may or may not have a continuous extension outside of that domain.
- similarly, the idea of multiple lossy models covering different domains, which pieced together suggest there could be a continuous simple function that works well over the combined domain.
- the skill of blurring your mind’s verbal/symbolic/social reasoning, to just look at what strictly literally happens.
- pointing at the most comfortable subcognitive compressions for complex data in the human brain. Metaphors that we keep settling on like ENERGY FLOWS and SOULS and LUCK, that unfold fractally into a bunch of tiny correlated details. Powerful, but not necessarily as a predictive model.
how is the ideal kademlia-like different if each node is also an AI that is learning how to predict the info it receives?
Psychoanalysis Today:
Is the AI Alignment problem only salient to me because of formative experiences with my grandmother?
I just really, really, strongly do not want to be emotionally vulnerable around my family. not even the level of emotionally vulnerable of being open about hiding my emotional vulnerabilities. This is happening at a level that I cannot override, if I try to force it intellectually that dissociates me from my emotions anyways. It is becoming apparent why I was in the habit to begin with.
hm.. having “don’t do this” laws where it is known that the real rule is “don’t be obvious or excessive doing this”… there’s a purpose to doing it that way. it forces certain activities to minimize their social footprint. Allistics can only do it in moderation, go too far down liberal enforcement and it becomes selective enforcement, go even further and writing down a law stops doing anything at all. An autistic median world would have to find that balance too, but its balance would be DIFFERENT. TheyWe lean so much harder on imposed structure to make the world navigable, we really need our words to mean things precisely, reliably. The point at which allistics set that tradeoff feels like willfully TEARING UP the most important commons so that a few people can get their jollies.
weeping their bathroom has separate switches for light and fan
I keep being surprised when things are just made of stuff, instead of throwing horrible undefined behavior outside of their established use cases.
lonely
I keep thinking I want to move to Canada. If I massively fuck up my life doing something stupid there, there is at least the possibility of a graceful exit plan. Messing up in America feels like a giant bleeding s-risk.
I am super into regrounding all of the rituals that have lost their purpose. Do nothing just because it was always done that way, that’s STUPID.
Follow the old ways because you’re nostalgic; they trace a comforting-familiar groove in your mind. Follow the old ways because they connect you mentally, emotionally, with people throughout history and the world. Follow the old ways because that seems to lead to good outcomes by mechanisms you don’t fully understand. Follow the old ways because you’re curious if you will come to find the others have found in them. Follow the old ways because you need to do the things SOMEWAY and this happens to a way you don’t have to organize from scratch. Follow the old ways because they are the BATNA to modern options, and you benefit from preserving your ability to walk away from a social contract.
Absolutely no one tell my grandmother.
I found my god. He lives in my friend’s head.
The literary metaphor of clipping a birds wings is so strongly ingrained in my head that I don’t know how my grandmother can talk about cutting up her hens with a straight face. I’m over here thinking “… are we the baddies?”.
Shoes invalidated, new shoes acquired
I want.. I want a way to talk about models and evidence REALLY talk about it, non field specific. At a level basic enough a child could do it, and maybe they don’t understand everything but they really UNDERSTAND what they understand and they know its edges have things they don’t. It needs advanced mathematics formal-proof underpinnings, but it must be grounded primarily in simpler checksums that your intuitionbrain can trust, and in plain English where possible. Lauren noted the plain English translations were important, Yudkowsky noted the formal proofs are important and is one of those people who does really good at having formal proofs hook into intuition, but not everyone is like that.
I talk a big game about arson and mad science, but there’s this holiday that gives me wide social lattitude to light explosive chemicals on fire and I’m pretty meh about the opportunity.
This stream is just my Tumblr but worse
Omfggshdhsijcn. It makes sense that young adult me got stuck on an obsessive need to stop people from thinking things about me. My teenage years overtrained HARD on trying to correct a family of people who still had my baby photos in their head when thinking about me.
Oh. I think I found my angle on the new rationality canon. Just tell the truth. Say what you literally actually mean about the actual literal truth.
I could sit and cry for at least 2 whole minutes about the fact that a human being did not want me to touch them.
Coming to realize my experience with unpacking privilege is unusual. I grew up knowing damn well I was privileged. Knew that some things which work out fine for me would never have flied if I was in my latina immigrant mother’s position. Knew that my struggles were barely anything with the deck so stacked so heavily in my favor. For me, racial justice was never a matter of learning to question everything I took for granted. I learned about a lot of additional ways the deck was stacked as I got older, but those were details. Never a fundamental restructuring of reality.
Instead, what I had to unlearn was the fucking idea that life is an Olympic sport. It isn’t. My successes are not getting graded on an effort curve against all the people for whom they are harder. I cannot fix other people having disadvantages in getting what they need by refusing to use my comparative advantages to get what I need. Indeed, I should often be USING. MY. UNFAIR. ADVANTAGES. to get people what they need when they can’t get it themselves. Fixing the system that keeps them unable to do so is a long term project, and they’ve got lives in the meantime.
“Begin as you mean to continue,” is critical advice. Hard shifting from TEST to PROD to a first approximation does not work in humans. What happens in aborted experiments affects your production state brain, you will train what you practice PERIOD.
I’ve been missing dancing in my life lately.
It has been a short time since Soulplay, and I’ve been unaccountably antsy. I think it’s because I forgot dancing. It one of the impulses/needs that gets quashed first, because it’s physically and socially obtrusive. I need space, I somewhat need music.
Right now I feel the desire to start dancing in the airport, and it is fighting SUCH a heavy counter pressure to not be a nuisance, to not get distracted from watching my stuff, to not draw attention.
The BART connection to the airport has more comprehensive explanations of basic interaction with their system posted. This is good design! Of course travellers in and out are likelier to get confused and need pointers.
Am I underestimating the recreational abuse of amphetamines because I know Zero people who would use a grey supply of it for that? Like, weed is RIGHT THERE, legal now. And SOMEONE in your network is gonna know how to get weirder or illegaler stuff if you want it. Why use the study drug to get high when you could instead use it to STUDY?!? 🤓
✅ the laptop and chargers
two caramels in the hand beats two pizza slices in the kitchen
hot take nutrition facts should include amino acid ratios.
I may in fact like vegetables when I get to choose which vegetables and in what proportions! Majority of the premixes suck for my purposes.
Vegetable pizza soon.
I haven’t recently entertained my parasocial relationship with the hypothetical NSA agent sifting through my online presence.
Hi there! No sedition to see here! (Yet, growth mindset.)
chug chug chug the water, I will not be one of those poor schmucks who has to trash their drinks or drain the bottles in front of the TSA.
Found the sugar + creamer mix in the label maker box. I assume this misplacement happened shortly after I finished labeling the container.
✅ assemble my pretty princess kit
I’ve made like, 3 separate microblog streams now. This is still a really cool one, but I’m not sure whether I’ll keep it up.
I sewed my noise canceling headphones muffs back together! They had literally come apart at the seams.
my strengths as a web developer do not lie in layout styling. which is a pity, because I’m pretty sure it matters a lot to my personal tools’ usability
cw:genocide
I suspect having semi-capable AI really DOES remove an important classical disincentive against using power to kill off huge swathes of the population. I’ve been thinking-not-thinking it for a while. For most of history, it’s been highly valuable for more people to be making things, coming up with ideas, and providing services which you don’t have to directly manage into doing so. Mass killing destroyed valuable resources in a way that takes time to recover from. But if it’s easy to Roll Your Own independent-ish agents–not removing people from where they already engaged elsewhere in the economy, but new ones… it suddenly becomes way more viable to try a genocide here and there. How do I tell if people mobilizing state power to do this is a non-negligible possibility and what could I do about it?
poisson distributions would be useful in law enforcement IF ANYONE INVOLVED UNDERSTOOD MATH.
I can’t do it. I can’t read the time cube page. I’m not strong enough.
slowly putting together a resume
Tried very hard to be Lawful neutral, that did NOT work. Pretty sure I’m chaotic good.
might get a job at the new community space
Grieving my childhood lost to an “education” almost entirely devoid of comprehension or agency.
I did not have my phone charged to post to this stream, nor did I have my fanny pack with notepad and pen. Many thoughts lost.
I locked myself into a number of poor choices this evening, and right now resent everything vaguely related to that.
Car is back from repairs. It’s so clean I could cry. In the driver’s seat I was momentarily confused where my windshield went, because I only saw beautifully crisp scenery and road ahead. Pretty sure they topped off my tire pressure too.
My realization about my insecurities: I get bothered when my partner doesn’t protect our relationship from turning adversarial. Even though I don’t intend to harm him, my subconscious doubts the existence of persistent allies. When I see his relaxed attitude towards possible betrayals, my subconscious interprets it as him being ready to curbstomp me. Reassurances of being on my side don’t help; his calmness looks like a potential threat. Like he’s hinting at a power dynamic that I’d be outmatched if he stops supporting me, a claim which I don’t totally buy but lingers in the background, unaddressed and unchallenged. That’s a problem.
showed up for a party a day early. have I mentioned that I hate the android calendar widget
Timing, periodicity, personal space, muscle tension, synchronization. It’s all vibes man. Get on the same wavelength.
The way we typically embody ourselves relative to other people is SO efficiently encoded in terms of emanating waves, refusing to give or receive communications in that form because “it’s a fake framework” is just being a pedantic idiot.
New standard phrasing for a concept I previously fumbled conveying:
“I predict with much sympathy that you feel . Sending you vibes.”
I’m eating salad I like. It makes sense how to accomplish stuff I want to do. How did this happen?
The temptation to write rationality posts entirely out of links to other rationality posts is real.
There’s also a good reason for it! There are multiple ways for the relationship between words <=> minds <=> reality to wind up completely fucked, and the trick to avoid that is to take time to reground the symbols before you use them for anything important. You don’t want to interrupt yourself that all the time doing that, so making the symbol itself point to an optional expansion on the composition & evidence base going into the symbol is pretty good!
“To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.”
Do you know what it looks like to have humility in the face of Framing Effects? It’s carrying around a fucking custom tarot deck. Because you will encounter problems that are tricky, and your first instinct will be to respond to the framing that the problem happened to be presented to you in. And then you can draw a new, random set of premises from your handy distribution of generic human-scope framing concepts, which you use to loosely reinterpret your understanding of the situation and see if that triggers different intuitions.
Me, complaining to ChatGPT about rationalists:
“I need people who will ‘Yes, and’ this problem instead of shutting down uncomfortable thoughts.”
“… OH FUCK”
I feel sad
Honestly kind of weirded out by how non-ironically awesome I find this One extremely online coder.
Have you thanked a sewage maintainer today?
To myself: Wow really, you just got done elaborating on how individuals cannot just decide that they work other than they do because that’s how a rational agent should work, and now you’re talking about having a COMMUNITY that up and decides to be different because that’s what a rational community would be like. Inconsistent much?
So, Mx “Panic meltdown at jiu jitsu when asked to move body in an unfamiliar way on short notice”, tell me again how you don’t have dyspraxia
🎵 I’M ON TONIGHT 🎵
🎵 oh baby when you talk like that, you make a woman go mad 🎶