Max Microblogging

Consider people who are *great* (like exceptional) at something in particular.

One of the things that makes them great is ~*meta-knowledge*, like knowledge about context regarding their *actions*.

I watched a bit of a recent Sea of Thieves WR speedrun - particularly the events during 7:25:00 -> 9:00:00 (it's like a 21hr run).

They lost like 1:20:00 from a choice to steal another crews loot b/c that crew chased them for a decent while.

A third ship joined in a bit, too.

Near the end of this chase (8:49:00) they spot another sloop (ship of 2 crew) and one guy jokes about taking this new ship's loot.

The two speedrunners have been talking about what to do at this point, and particularly risk/rewards tradeoffs for how to sell the loot.

The two guys are good enough to - ordinarily - take on another sloop no problem.

after all, they just fought off 2 other crews of sizes 4 and 3.

their choice not to go after the sloop (and the humor of the joke) is based in this like ~*meta-knowledge~ type stuff.

it doesn't matter how great you are at something, even the best ppl in the world know there are some challenges they won't win (or it's too much a risk), and the choose to back off. they're not OP just because they're the best in the world.

Generalising this means something like: the ~meta-knowledge is *at least* as important as the knowledge about how to do the skill well (which is more like technical knowledge). Or, at least it's that important at high levels.

Basically, this is like "don't overreach", or rather, if you do overreach, don't expect to *still* be great. the ability to pick challenges is part of the reason great people are great. sorta like flying *close*, but not *too close*, to the sun.

It also relates to knowing your limits, either when something is too big a task or when (and what) to learn before doing it.

This offers a bit more clarity for an ongoing conflict of mine - something to do with learning styles and methods. I intuitively think that 'exploratory' style learning (with a high(er) error rate) has benefits. and I mean it's not as bad as doing nothing at all (I guess it could be sometimes), but it's not as efficient as directed and non-overreaching learning.

I think part of the reason I have this conflict is in essence thinking too much of my own skills. That's true even tho, I went through a few ~breakpoints early on in the *Tutoring Max* series. (Breakpoints might not be the right word, but I think there are like significant points of increased ~reach when we adopt new and better ideas about ourselves)

> an ongoing conflict of mine - something to do with learning styles and methods.

Sometimes I prioritize the wrong thing. I'll spend time on fun (and maybe even slightly useful) 'intellectual' activities like coding, instead of doing more structured, efficient, and goal directed learning. That's like eating the seed corn.

It's like: I end up fed, and I still have some seed corn left over, but the harvest isn't going to be as good. What's the point of learning and thinking if not for the harvest?

indirectly related: #18025 and https://curi.us/2378-eliezer-yudkowsky-is-a-fraud

#18034

> time is somewhat different in that you can't save it for later. but, like money, you can spend time on things with later benefits (investment rather than consumption).

I'm not sure if we disagree on something or not. I think we roughly agree but I'm thinking of time spent in a specific way (just a subset of the time we get). For context, I read curi.us/2378 a few minutes before having that idea. I liked these bits particularly (and liked being reminded of them)

> capital goods, not consumption goods

> accumulation of capital increasing the productivity of labor

I think time can be sometimes seen like money and other capital goods. How do people save money? One option is a bank account, but that performs poorly, and is sort of like investing in loans/debt, anyway. Better investors save money by spending it *on capital goods* (and they choose the goods). After they spend money, they don't have it any more, but they have something else they can exchange for money later.

I think *time spent on learning* is similar, but not all time spent is similar. Granted, there's no bank account for time, but you can spend time now so you get more of it later -- that's one of the reasons to learn and think, you - in essence - get more time in the future because you avoid making mistakes or being slower than you could be. In that sense it's like investing in productive capacity. There's a higher upfront cost, but you get a higher capacity and larger RoI than the alternatives. The choice to spend time learning ineffectively seems to me like spending some chunk of your factory budget on hookers and cocaine; fun at the time, but it's in opposition to the main goal.

Similarly, by analogy, learning skills that don't end up helping you, but learning them effectively, is like market risk. Not every investment makes a profit, but diversification helps, and the better you are the less you waste.

Time spent on things like downtime is different from normal money; that's more like $100 of food stamps you both get once a week and have to spend the same week. You might only be able to spend it at low-quality grocers, but avoiding spending it only hurts you.

An alternative thing about spending time on learning is trying to spend downtime doing pseudo-learning stuff. That's more like trying to invest your $100 food stamp (not going to go well). I find trying to do ~learning stuff when I'm tired etc. often means I stay up later, sleep worse, and have less high-capacity time for important things.

#18037 yeah okay, I see what you mean. I've changed my mind on the quality of my analogy. (I don't think it's super bad or anything, just not as good as I originally thought.)

> I intuitively think that 'exploratory' style learning (with a high(er) error rate) has benefits.

Whether something is an error depends on your goal. If your goal is to get it correct, exploring works badly. If your goal is e.g. to get a rough overview, exploring works well.

>> I intuitively think that 'exploratory' style learning (with a high(er) error rate) has benefits.

> Whether something is an error depends on your goal. If your goal is to get it correct, exploring works badly. If your goal is e.g. to get a rough overview, exploring works well.

I hadn't considered this. It makes sense. That said, I don't think it's what I had in mind.

The italicised bits of this example are a bit of an outline.

An example is the route-finding-app I made for my SSOL speedrun: *I spent way too long* trying to get the PNG of the map as a background image behind the lines and points that get drawn. *Eventually I managed it* (after lots of different attempts and integrating bits of code I found online). *The main difficulty* was that the original author of the (simple) travelling salesman program used Haskell's GLUT library which is basically a *lowish-level* OpenGL lib (and *I'm not familiar* with low level opengl stuff). There are higher-level ones that make this stuff easy. *I only really cared about the outcome but it took way longer than I wanted it to.*

I didn't read a manual or in depth tutorial, instead tried to fumble my way though. That is sometimes faster. But you can't tell stuff like 'how long is left till I finish?' and other basic questions.

In some ways my process involved exploring as you describe. I toyed with the idea of switching to a higher level library, looked for higher level stuff that exposed/integrated with the lower level stuff (no luck), and read bits from the middles of some advanced/in-depth tutorials.

But, crucially, the exploring was a side-effect of a particular problem with the other bits. I'd say my choice of method when trying to get the PNG to draw on-screen was exploratory learning, so it's different to exploration as you describe (though somewhat related).

Eventually I found some code someone had written that was close enough to what I needed to make it work. There was a weird interaction with other code I'd written tho (involving drawing text), that meant the first line of text was the right size but all the other lines didn't appear on screen. I managed to fix that but it took another like 30 min of experimentation.

A better method - in hindsight - would have been to just do a tutorial for Gloss (an alternative opengl-based library, but much higher level) and recode what I'd already written, and the opengl bits that came with the app originally. I could have gone through enough of a tutorial on Gloss given the amount of time I spent (like 5hrs+).

I did learn other stuff during that time, but I didn't feel like the time was particularly well spent. I don't expect to use OpenGL + Haskell much in future, so it's not like this is particularly useful outside this one thing I wanted to do.

In some ways I do this stuff for the challenge, like thinking "I should be able to do this, so I will", but I don't think "I should be able to do this, eventually, but should I bother, or should I look for a different way to do the same outcome?"

s/corrosively/coercively

> Genes (or other biology) don’t have any direct influence over our intelligence or personality.

I'm not sure about this. I don't think humans being universal understanders/explainers means genes *don't* have a direct influence over our mind/personality (esp. starting conditions). It seems reasonable that physical effects on the brain can have an effect on our mind/thinking (e.g. brain tumors, head trauma), and genes affect things in ways we don't fully understand, so there's room for them to have a direct effect.

#18154

> What sort of effect or influence do you have in mind, via what causal mechanisms?

I'm not sure about this possibility, but it's a thing I've heard or seems to be a somewhat common idea:

- temperament: Say someone has a gene that means they produce lots of some hormone. That hormone makes them angry more often / more easily.

Does this sort of thing count as a direct influence over our personality? I can see a person like this 'learning to control' themselves or something, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean by directly influencing personality.

More broadly, I see room for unknown causal mechanisms, esp. relating to things that make sense to have evolutionary roles, like social stuff. I could see some genes play a role in how readily someone accepts static memes based around certain social signals (e.g. in group/out group stuff).

> For example, genes could ... but I don't think that would cause some people to be atheists.

I agree that there are ways genes could affect our brains at a lower level (like an instruction set affects CPU performance) and that this sort of effect isn't substantial.

> Low level changes do not cause high level changes that have the appearance of complex design unless there's a specific causal mechanism set up to enable this

*A*: Don't we have a (rudimentary) explanation for hormones affecting thoughts, though? I know--personally--I think different things when in different moods (at least I think that's the case).

> I think how one responds to heat, cold or hormones is part of what one's personality is. But they aren't controlling your reactions. The reactions are your choice based on your ideas.

*B*: It feels like you're implying reactions are core to understanding personality, like the only way we can inspect personality is via its effect on our reactions.

I googled 'personality' and found a sensible-feeling definition about patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Those are all based on ideas, so by that definition personality is just a collection of ideas.

----

I'm not sure if part A and B contradict each other. I'm not super happy with this reply but I think the result might be going to back to another part of the conversation.

PS, I labeled the paragraphs to refer to them, hopefully that made sense when reading.

#18158

> Are you linking hormones to moods? You bring up something about hormones affecting thoughts but then the next sentence doesn't mention hormones.

Yes. I think most ppl presume a super tight relationship between them. That doesn't seem right--thinking about it now.

*Some* effect might be there, but that's like a transition between levels of emergence, and probably means I don't have a point here.

Going to drop this angle for the moment.

> > It feels like you're implying reactions are core to understanding personality, like the only way we can inspect personality is via its effect on our reactions.

> I don't think that and I don't see how my text implied it.

Given you agreed with "personality is just a collection of ideas" I'm not sure this is important to discuss unless you think so. I can explain why I thought the implication was there if you want.

**concluding comment**: I think I agree with you that hormones don't influence personality/thoughts in a substantial way (I think you agree with that at least).

I think at this point it's up to me to come up with some other causal mechanism? Or the only other node on my conversation tree I have to look into atm is mine about unknown causal mechanism.

> Do you think your made an error? If so how'd that happen?

Yes, will do a postmortem in a different post.

> Yes I'm curious.

Cool, will also put this in a diff post because it feels off-topic.

> That's an option. Another is ...

I want to take a bit to think about where to go from here. I didn't really consider how many possibilities there were. Some of those options I might be able to follow myself (like a thought experiment) to see where they lead.

I've been thinking about why FI is special/different. It's related to the general topic of FI and new ppl, their reactions, etc.

curi said in Discord:

>> [12:14 AM] Laozi Haym: it isn't anything new i need to watch what I say, I just ...was watching what I was saying 2 days ago on here

>

> if you're mistaken about something it's better to say it and get criticism rather than hide the error. so i generally don't like people watching what they say. and feeling pressured about it sucks too.

>

> sometimes people try to say only their highest quality ideas but they don't go through life using only those. most of the time they're not at their best. what you do when you're tired or distracted is part of your life, and should be exposed to criticism too.

I think part of FI being different is to do with the culture related to things like "if you're mistaken about something it's better to say it and get criticism", and "what you do when you're tired or distracted is part of your life, and should be exposed to criticism too."

When people come to FI they don't expect other parts of their life (maybe implied by things they said) to be questioned. It's doesn't adhere to normal social norms. That's--in part--b/c those ppl and normal social norms don't value stuff like: error correction, every person and discussion being a potential beginning of infinity, the capacity for ppl to make progress (esp rapidly), etc. There is some lip-service paid to these ideas, and they're taken somewhat seriously in dire situations, but they're not like culturally ubiquitous, common, or expected.

That lip-service is part of the reason pointing out those things individually doesn't work to differentiate FI; everyone says it, and everyone says they're honest. But the culture is different; what's tolerated, what's expected, what's prioritized, what things are seen as important.

Even that paragraph doesn't work outside this sort of context. I don't expect it would convince anyone who didn't already understand it (at least: understand it enough to know what I was trying to get at and whether I had mistakes, etc).

>>>> Don't we have a (rudimentary) explanation for hormones affecting thoughts, though? I know--personally--I think different things when in different moods (at least I think that's the case).

>>> Are you linking hormones to moods? You bring up something about hormones affecting thoughts but then the next sentence doesn't mention hormones.

>> Yes. I think most ppl presume a super tight relationship between them. That doesn't seem right--thinking about it now.

>> *Some* effect might be there, but that's like a transition between levels of emergence, and probably means I don't have a point here.

>> Going to drop this angle for the moment.

> Do you think your made an error? If so how'd that happen?

### postmortem

I implied mood and hormones were linked. I didn't explicitly mention it.

When curi pointed out I linked them I realised that I was presuming an intimiate relationship and that I didn't have a good explanation for it.

There's a ~common idea that they're intimately linked. I think, in general, it's a good way for ppl to avoid taking responsibility for their reactions to stuff. e.g. women a more irritable on their period and so they shouldn't be held to as high standards / ppl should be more forgiving of them getting upset / etc. This is roughly called a 'mood cycle', which is explicitly linked to hormonal cycles of the same length (I've heard 28 days for women and 33 days for men).

When curi pointed out my linking hormones and moods I thought about the common idea and questioned it. I didn't question it when I first used it though. Why didn't I question it?

Intuition: In general when we're thinking about something particular there are ideas that are 'in the front' of our mind and other ideas 'in the back' of our mind. We are actively engaging with the 'front' ideas, but not the 'back' ideas. (Maybe the 'back' ideas could be called background knowledge but that term feels like it describes a slightly different thing.) To question an idea it needs to come to the 'front'. It's sort of like a module of code: we interact with the API but we don't interact with the internal logic. When ideas are at the 'front' we're looking at the internal logic and API, but at the 'back' we're only looking at the API. We use shortcuts to know how ideas at the 'back' interact with stuff.

So by that intuition: I had the hormones->mood link in the back of my mind and didn't think about the internal logic until curi brought it to the 'front' by pointing it out.

I'm a bit worried that this is just a long winded way of saying something like 'lazy thinking', but it feels like there's probably more to it, so I'm okay with it for the moment.

One of the ways I could avoid this is by categorizing old 'background' ideas (like the hormones-mood link) as stuff I need to reconsider before using. In some ways it doesn't matter much if I get ~lots better at thinking WRT 'front' ideas, but keep using bad ideas as foundations without questioning them. So I need to make a habit about questioning ideas I use as a foundation if I haven't considered them since improving my thinking. There are practical limits on this, like lots of my preexisting ideas are fine (or at least fit-for-purpose at the time) and reconsidering them consistently would be significant overhead. If I'm using ideas as part of my reasoning, though, that's a good reason to reconsider them, at least briefly.

#18187

> Often you should check if they agree instead of assuming you got it right.

I think I was trying to do that with:

>> It feels like you're implying reactions are core to understanding personality, like the only way we can inspect personality is via its effect on our reactions.

If that wasn't clear, is there a good way to do it better? I could explicitly say "to check I have this right, are you implying ... ?". That feels cumbersome though.

#18188 "feels like" is kinda vague but generally (when there aren't clear emotions involved) reads similar to "i think". i don't read it as a question or requesting confirmation.

A question version at around the same length is:

> Are you saying reactions are core to understanding personality, like the only way we can inspect personality is via its effect on our reactions?

Formatting:

The dotpoints above are in this hierarchy:

- 1

- 1.1

- 1.1.1

- 2

- 2.1

- 2.2

- 2.3

> I don't think the initial ideas in the brain matter a lot.

for clarity: so you think it is possible we have ideas encoded in genes that are given to ~everyone during prenatal development (or shortly after birth, w/e)?

the idea that the *initial ideas* in the brain don't have any long term significance on our thoughts (and genes can give us some initial ideas) is a stronger and different position than I thought you had.

#18194 I think our genes set us up with adequately powerful and generic hardware + OS + maybe some initial default apps that are replaceable. I don't think these end up mattering that much cuz of choice, abstraction layers, and universality – no missing features/capabilities. As far as their ability to bias us in a particular direction (as in variance in these things between people could make some people more mathy and others more artsty, or some people more angry and some more calm), while it's not exactly zero, I think it's tiny compared to how much culture and childhood and thinking about stuff matters. It's just a drop in the ocean. (This is also DD's position btw.)

#18196 And I don't think the variance between people is anything like intel vs ARM chips or windows vs. linux OS. Even that isn't such a huge deal, but genes created a particular hardware and OS design and variance is limited to be more minor and not break things. Variance isn't gonna be so huge as to create a drastically different design.

> - part of that conjecture is **male reaction to sexual signals ~flipping** to avoid being unattracted to fertile women

The idea of ~flipping is roughly:

- animals are attracted to symbols like swollen breasts / butt, particular inflammations, temporary colouring, etc.

- animals (all but humans) don't have breasts when they don't need them. They only grow them when necessary, and they're not swollen at other times

- modern women have ~swollen breasts *all* the time (there's some difference between lactating/not lactating but it's minor compared to other animals)

-- maintaining breasts costs resources, there's an evolutionary reason not to do it

- the male reaction to swollen breasts is to *not* be attracted b/c it means the female isn't fertile (this is true in other animals)

- human males around the time women developed permanent breasts had this reaction too (along with other things like fatter -> good -> more resources / better chance of children surviving)

- one evolutionary reaction could have been to like fix the 'pattern' for what males found attractive (e.g. breasts -> good now, fatter -> still good)

- but the *simplest* change necessary is just a binary 'not' - i.e. things that weren't attractive now are, and things that were attractive aren't

-- admittedly (thinking about it now) why didn't humans die out because malnourished women were selected over non-malnourished?

- so males had this gene flipped by evolution and breasts were attractive now

This sounds like a way genes had (and have) a significant role in thoughts.

Possible criticism: this is just an idea we get when we're young and some people change it, some don't, but it doesn't mean genes have a *substantial* role in affecting thoughts, just that like this one inborn(?) idea is different.

I marked inborn with a (?) because I'm not sure I'm using it right.

#18200 So once upon a time humans were animals. Apes or something. Not yet intelligent. And they had behaviors controlled by genes just like cats do.

Did humans get permanent breasts then or later (after intelligence)? I'm not clear on the claim/story yet.

Anyway, later, humans become human/intelligent. Then they have memes. And memes start taking over control of lots of stuff including sexual preferences, courtship behaviors, etc. Memes evolve faster than genes and have access to better control over adult humans – ideas are in a better position to effect behavior than protein design at ~birth is.

If humans evolved permanent breasts before memes, there's no real issue, right?

If humans evolved permanent breasts after memes, that'd be more complicated. Does Lindybeige claim or address that?

> If humans evolved permanent breasts before memes, there's no real issue, right?

Agreed

> If humans evolved permanent breasts after memes, that'd be more complicated. Does Lindybeige claim or address that?

I can't find a reference to dates more specific than ~last 2.5 million years (the Pleistocene). If he did mention a more specific date I don't recall it and can't find it via some quick searches.

The discussion about genes and intelligence above is discussed and written in:

https://youtu.be/BDwiP4lsC_4

and

https://youtu.be/1J6ECV9L11g

Tangent near the end of a patio11 thread:

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1315157487633354753

> Lots of cryptocurrency projects think that there is a way for any part of their ecosystem to be done by non-professionals in the long-run and they are all fools.

> Miners, devs, promoters, capital, etc, will all be professionalized.

Talking with curi during Tutoring Max #49

Topic: There are no conflicts of interest between rational men.

----

## rough brainstorming

idea seems to be

- if people want to do good / make progress / improve something

- then that has to be compatible with objective reality

- reality is such that we can't choose the right path to make progress

- rational people will focus on a goal (which is not doing harm to someone particularly)

- and the method to get that goal has to be compatible with objective reality

... (idea feels unclear so I'm swapping brainstorming topic)

'possible' solutions

- violence

- compromise

- 'winner' pays 'loser'?

- auction -> one person no longer wants the job?

----

What is the scenario, what is the conflict, and why is it not fixable?

## scenario

Alice and Bob both want a particular job. They are both suitable applicants. There's only one job, so at most only one of Alice,Bob can get the job.

## conflict

Alice/Bob are competing for a scarce resource. They might think that their life would be worse if they didn't get the job.

## fixableness

There are ways to fix it by introducing e.g. another position like the first, but is it fixable without introducing stuff?

Alice/Bob could talk and one could persuade the other it'd be better not to have it.

Fixableness has a time constraint -- knowing a solution might be available in the future doesn't help the problem now.

So for it to be 'fixable' we'd need a solution that generally applies to all situations like this, and we need to be able to apply the solution right away.

#18321

> It's important to think about scenarios in reality. Say the business owner, Joe, wants to interview both Alice and Bob, and then wants to hire Alice not Bob.

This sounds like a situation where, if Bob knew Joe's thoughts, he shouldn't want the job. If Joe's already made up their mind, wouldn't that be a reason for Bob to spend efforts on other opportunities?

> In what scenario does Bob get the job? What series of events? What exactly does Bob want to be different (or or in the recent past) and by what means would that change be achieved?

Bob get's the job if Joe changes their mind, or Alice finds another job (or otherwise withdraws).

Joe might change his mind if s/he finds out something bad about Alice, or if it turns out Joe's idea of Alice was wrong. There could be lots of ways that happens, but it's not something that can be relied upon. Joe might also learn something new about Bob.

Generally it seems like either Joe or Alice would need to change their mind or learn something new for things to end up with Bob getting the job.

Bob wants Joe's opinion to change (the opinion that Alice is the better one to hire). Bob could do a really good interview and persuade Joe -- or something like the above could happen.

I guess something unexpected could happen too (like Alice getting hit by a bus) but I don't think Bob wants that so it seems pointless to expand on.

If Joe is bad at hiring, that may be bad for me. I may get a worse result. But it's bad for him too. This isn't a conflict between me and Joe. He's trying to deal with life and hiring well. If he's doing it poorly, that's due to ignorance, lack of skill, etc., not due to what benefits Joe and what benefits me being in conflict.

#18324

> If Joe is bad at hiring, that may be bad for me. I may get a worse result. But it's bad for him too. This isn't a conflict between me and Joe. He's trying to deal with life and hiring well. If he's doing it poorly, that's due to ignorance, lack of skill, etc., not due to what benefits Joe and what benefits me being in conflict.

Okay, I see how this answers the idea that Joe's ideas have something to do with a conflict of interests. It'd be in both your interests for Joe to be better at hiring if he was bad at it. But Joe can't magically get better. So Joe just is what he is in that role. It's better he make a free choice than be coerced or something. So any alternative system that coerces him is worse, and in any system where he has a free choice he'd act roughly the same anyway.

#18327

>> I agree with: a world with short term good outcomes from a bad system is worse than a world with a good system.

> I doubt that any of the general purpose systems like "bribery" or "favors" for assigning jobs actually would offer Bob all the jobs he wants. They might well fail to give Bob this particular job. They might well not only deny Bob this job but make it much harder for him to find an alternative one.

> But those are generic, principled systems, even if the principles suck. What about a biased system? What about a system where Bob is in charge of everything? Would *that* be in Bob's interests? Should people want to be a king?

I think it's rational to want systems which can be agreed upon by everyone. Sort of like a 'lowest common denominator'. I don't think rational people want a system that's unfair--like Bob being in charge of everything.

I don't think people should want to be a king. One reason is that if I wanted to be a king, and was willing to do necessary things to achieve that, then I should expect other people to do so too. That just ends in violence, etc. Another reason is that if we were all kings it would be like having a billion city states, which would suck b/c we'd end up like subsisting.

There are reasons based on principles too, like being a king means using force to get your way, which is bad. But not everyone agrees on those. I think people more generally agree on practical stuff like 'if we all did that we'd all have nothing'. That's why I chose to write the two practical reasons.

>> Do you think there are any other methods by which jobs could be handed out? Does Joe having better ideas count as another method?

> I don't know a better system than capitalism/freedom/property-rights/etc.

I guess *all* other systems have to be better or worse than that. There's no orthogonal direction. I'm unsure if there are things to consider other than what we already did: stuff that looks like a conflict but isn't (e.g. Joe's ideas), and alternate systems for distributing jobs.

#18328

> Another reason is that if we were all kings it would be like having a billion city states, which would suck b/c we'd end up like subsisting.

I forgot to mention: the other option with all of us being kings is basically capitalism/freedom/property-rights/etc, anyway.

#18331 I don’t think the “rational” qualifier is required anymore than the sometimes-used “long term interests” qualifier. It’s in people’s best interests to be rational and to consider their long term interests not merely the short term.

The liberal claims re harmony of interests don’t rely on unlimited knowledge. They are not like “if men knew everything, there’d be harmony”. They are about avoiding conflict now. Understanding why you shouldn’t hate competitors for a job is achievable today given currently available knowledge.

#18333 Can you come up with some other scenarios, besides competing job applicants, with some sort of apparent conflict of interest?

#18334

> Can you come up with some other scenarios, besides competing job applicants, with some sort of apparent conflict of interest?

* one banana tree but two hungry people (and not enough bananas)

* multiple candidates running in the same election

* rich guy in a suit walking past drowning person (I'm not sure about this one)

* limited edition consumer goods

* competing for entry into a tournament (like the tetris world cup where the top 50 ppl go through)

* two kids who want particular gifts but their parents don't have enough money for both gifts

What do you now think of these scenarios? Got some solutions re them being potential conflicts of interest?

- We both want the same diamond.

- We both want the same computer.

- We both want to marry the same woman.

- We both want the same slot on the manned mission to the moon.

- We both want to be President (of the same country).

- We both want to be the top commander of the army.

- I want to speak my mind but you don’t like what I have to say and would prefer I shut up.

- I want to kiss you but you don’t want to kiss me.

- I sell printers and you sell printers and we’re competing for customers.

also posted to: https://xertrov.github.io/fi/posts/2020-10-18-notes-on-conflicts-of-interest/

Can all these be resolved?

> - We both want the same diamond.

> - We both want the same computer.

> - We both want to marry the same woman.

> - We both want the same slot on the manned mission to the moon.

> - We both want to be President (of the same country).

> - We both want to be the top commander of the army.

> - I want to speak my mind but you don’t like what I have to say and would prefer I shut up.

> - I want to kiss you but you don’t want to kiss me.

> - I sell printers and you sell printers and we’re competing for customers.

## principle

Conflicts of interest (CoIs) seem to exist sometimes. When considering rational ppl or trying-to-be-rational ppl, those conflicts don't actually exist--they're illusions which can be resolved. They look like conflicts because we're ignoring the bigger picture. Ppl involved in the CoI shouldn't want to 'win' via a system which use force to get an outcome. They should want a system that's fair and works generally. A system with universality.

Systems which use force or unwritten rules are not preferable to free-market situations b/c they have adverse consequences outside of one's control (e.g. violence, 'winners' being decided by something like physical attractiveness or social status, etc). They outcomes -- when decided with alternative systems -- are worse for ppl involved. Reasons include: bad distribution of resources, outcomes being based on perceived problems that a person can't solve (e.g. not handsome enough), harm being done (e.g. violence), etc.

## We both want the same diamond.

Expansion of situation: we are both in a shop buying an engagement ring for our respective soon-to-be fiancées, and want the same diamond (diamond-A).

1. The initial 'solution' is that the shop sells diamond-A to whomever asks for it first. Person-A gets it. This is okay because both ppl can agree to a first-come-first-serve model (which is typical and expected).

2. Maybe person-B *really* wants the diamond. They can offer to buy it from person-A. This is okay because it's consensual trade where both ppl are better off.

3. Say person-A says they want to buy it but hasn't paid, but person-B has the cash now. The shop could work on a first-come-first-serve basis where the transaction is the important moment (who can pay first), so person-B gets it. this is an agreeable system.

4. Maybe there is another diamond (diamond-B) that one of the ppl is happy with, so person-A gets diamond-A, person-B gets diamond-B.

in each case an alternative system of distribution (based on attractive looks, or social status, or bribes, or whatever) is not preferable -- it's a worse society to live in.

## We both want the same computer.

Say it's a rare old computer so there's only one of them and it's not fungible. We can agree on a system which is fair, like an auction, and proceed on that basis.

## We both want to marry the same woman.

She should choose who she wants to be with (if either of us). We shouldn't want to be with someone who doesn't want to be with us (that would be bad for both me and her). We should both want her to be able to consider both of us. If I had an advantage (e.g. knew her earlier) and tried to stop her meeting you b/c I thought she'd prefer you, then it means I have to keep that effort up WRT you and any one else she might meet. So eventually I'd need to be coercive or forceful to do that. Hurting the person you want to marry is a shit thing to do (and a bad way to live long term), so I shouldn't want to prevent her evaluating other potential partners. I should actually be in favour of that because it means problems are apparent sooner rather than later. Living in a relationship where big problems *will* occur and that can't be resolved (e.g. she changes her mind about wanting to marry me) is bad for me, so if there will be problems I should want to know about them as soon as possible.

## We both want the same slot on the manned mission to the moon.

Say there are 3 crew slots and 2 crew members have been decided and are better candidates than us (at least for those slots, like the other crew have skills we don't).

### notes on alternatives to free-market / merit based judgement

- We shouldn't want to be chosen if that would jeopardise the mission -- it being successful is more important. we can agree that the most qualified person should be chosen, or the person otherwise chosen s.t. the mission has the greatest chance of success. Maybe we're equally qualified, though.

- We don't want a system where one of us is harmed (e.g. I hurt your family to keep you out of the mission). If I wanted that it could mean my family (or me) is hurt, which I don't want.

- We don't want the mission to be jeopardised for political reasons (or other parochial stuff), so we should be in favour of a selection criteria which is publicly and politically defensible (and just).

- We don't want a system where one of us is prevented from doing stuff in the future like other moon missions.

- We don't want a system where NASA (or whomever) regrets their decision (e.g. because it was made via nepotism or whatever).

- We don't want a system where we hate each-other because that could mean we can't be on the same future mission or otherwise end up excluded from other stuff.

### solutions?

- We can agree on a system based on merit

- We can agree on a system where NASA maintain a suitable body of astronauts (like a minimum number of astronauts kept in reserve), so some rotation is necessary (maybe one of us went on the last mission so the other should go on this one)

-- We can also agree on a system which takes into account future rotations, e.g. flip a coin and one of us goes on this one, and the other goes on the next mission

- We can agree on a system that doesn't bias one of us for external reasons like social status (if that happened, all missions would be worse off and have a lower chance of success)

operating under these sorts of systems is preferable to winning the slot under a different system. if it was some different system then how could we be confident that our crew is the best crew possible?

## We both want to be President (of the same country).

Note: curi and I sort of started discussing this at the end of *Tutoring Max #49*.

We should both be in favour of a good system for selecting a president. We can agree on important features such a system should have, like not favouring one of us. We should want a system where the victory conditions are clear and compatible with our values. We should want a system where we could lose b/c it's possible the other person is a better choice regardless of what we believe.

The conflict only exists when we have bad, irrational systems for choosing a president. If the system is bad then we can both agree changing the system is more important (and subsequently find a system which satisfies both our goals).

If there are other candidates, we should prefer those candidates who will institute a better system to those who won't. If there are perverse mechanics in the selection system (e.g. like those in first-past-the-post when you have 2 similar candidates running s.t. it *decreases* the chance of a favourable outcome) then we should both be in favour of cooperating to maximise the chance of one of us winning over bad candidates. We can find such a system.

We could also run a pre-election or something to decide which of us runs in the main election (similar to primaries in USA).

## mid exercise reflection

I worry that I'm missing something. Are these adequate answers? Do any of the apparent conflicts persist after what I've written?

I think these are hard problems to write about -- in some ways -- b/c there are always unknown and unspecified details which could be chosen to make the situation a 'nightmare situation' (as curi put it in TM#49).

Going to have a think and maybe come back to this later.

I edited the OP to add the Max tutoring playlist link https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKx6lO5RmaetREa9-jt2T-qX9XO2SD0l2

https://curi.us/2390-what-to-sell-or-give-away

This is like a (goal, context) pair. it's not necessarily specific, like there's a lot that's implied or possibly known from wider context, but in essence it's a GC.

I think the idea of a partial IGC is nice and makes some sense. like the idea of 'when you've got a hammer every problem is a nail' is expressing an IC pair; there's a method and a context but no idea besides using the hammer like normal.

#18525 yeah you can brainstorm solutions to a goal/problem (or set of similar goals) in a context. you generally want a goal/problem before a solution. solutions/ideas in search of problems doesn't work well.

I'm requesting feedback for the following draft. It's not done, so I've left some of my own comments as quotes below -- just the most important stuff which came to mind.

My biggest concern is that someone might read this and feel bad about choices they've made which are actually okay. If you have ideas about how to avoid this or whether it will happen I'd like to hear them. This is written because it's how *I* see *myself*, not because it's how I think everyone else should see themselves and each other.

Some of the language is a bit fancy. I'll do more editing in future drafts to simplify it, but suggestions/crits are welcome.

The draft is as follows:

# Why I Live

Existing matters. Particularly: *our* existing matters. Existing--as a *human*--is special, unique, and full of potential. We are--or at least, can be--cosmically significant.

My choices--today and in the coming decades--must have *some* impact on humanity's future. My choices *today*, more than any other moment, have the greatest leverage in influencing the manner and magnitude of that impact. Tomorrow, tomorrow's choices will have the most leverage. If there are important choices to be made, perhaps I should pursue an understanding of them with some urgency.

Can my choices be so significant that they make an appreciable difference in the volume, quality, and proximity of important milestones in the future of humanity? That is, they contribute to a future with *more people* leading lives of *higher quality* (both std of living and std of ideas) and *achieving* important philosophical and technological *progress sooner*.

If one's choices could matter that much, how could one possibly *know* that? Humanity and the route we take into the future are, together, like a giant snooker table loaded with hyperactive billiard balls and a thousand collisions for each single choice any person ever makes. Unpredictable, chaotic, immeasurably complex. *Everyone* will have *some* choices they make that will impact our collective future in a significant way. However, most people will never know which choices were the special ones. Most people's choices--the ones that end up mattering--will be special by *luck*. Their other choices--the ones they *hoped* would matter--will end up swallowed and forgotten by the passage of time.

> I need to remember to answer the questions I set up here. Currently I don't actually answer them, though I intend to.

> The snooker table analogy is energetic (which I wanted) but doesn't flow super well and is maybe over the top or dominating the paragraph w/ it's length.

> I'm not sure if I should avoid answering 'yes' to the 'can my choices …' question. I think it might work better to answer (and explain) it later.

## Choices

Imagine yourself at the divergence of your futures.

To the left is a future of hit and miss choices, erratic legacy, and the fog of cosmic uncertainty. However, you can have a straight forward life. Your choices need not carry the epistemic burdens of depth, nor urgency, nor consequence.

To the right is *the alternative*.

Not everyone can take the right path. But some people can. Some people have. Maybe I can. And maybe you can, too.

Before you think about which path to attempt, *what would it mean to choose poorly?*

What if you chose the right path but you fell short? What difference would that make compared to choosing left? *At worst*, realistically, *there would be no difference*; or at least no difference worth considering here.

What if you chose the left path, but you could have chosen *the alternative … **and succeeded?*** Would your decedents look back and think "they should have known better?" Would there even be decedents to look back? What good purpose could there be in avoiding greatness? What hope does a future of greatness-aversion have?

Can choosing mediocrity be evil? Certainly not always. Maybe sometimes.

The reality is that you are presented, not with two paths, but infinitely many paths every moment of every day. You are not constrained to a dichotomy of greatness or mediocrity. You are the beginning of a new infinity -- if you choose to be.

> I think I'm mostly okay with this section -- at least on this pass. I'm not sure about the "Can choosing mediocrity be evil?" bit.

## What About Failure?

I used to be worried about failing. "Could it be that I will spend my life in vain pursuit of greatness and progress?" If the past half decade had been different, that might have become true. I know better, now.

Contribution to the future--to *progress*--is not zero sum. No thinker can contribute to progress if they are cut off from civilization. The credit for the impact of a great thinker's choices must be shared. As a light-cone constrains the the causes and effects of an event, an epistemic idea-cone constrains the prerequisites and consequences of a great thinker and their ideas. All those people inside the idea-cone share the credit. Without shoulders to stand on, an otherwise great man is blind. Without feet to stand on his shoulders, an otherwise great man is dumb.

The acts of pursuing, supporting, and nurturing greatness are noble and honourable deeds.

> I think I will expand on this last paragraph/line. It's okay to do 1 or 2 or 3 of those things. Arguably it's hard to avoid doing all of them if you spend time improving your thinking and know about FI / CF.

> This section feels like it might be a bit out of place. I like the middle paragraph. I wrote the middle paragraph first during brainstorming and then decided it needed a section. So I picked the title and wrote the first paragraph around paragraph 2. I like the last line, but I think it needs elaboration.

## So.

What is my choice? Do I choose a future where my choices matter? Yes or no?

I do. And I will continue to.

I refuse to retreat.

> I originally had paragraph 1 in the 2nd person, which might not go so well with the vibe. Originally:

> > What is your choice? Do you choose a future where your choices matter? Yes or no?

> I'm on the fence about stuff like "I refuse to retreat". On the one hand I think it has some of the weight I want, but it feels maybe a bit too close to like a war/violence theme. That can be inspiring for ppl sometimes ("never give up, never surrender" sorta thing), but maybe there's a better thing to say.

------

## some leftover notes

* end game for universe / civilization / intelligence?

** dunno, but ~100 years humanity debated whether other galaxies exist

** today, there are multiple conjectures--with disparate mechanics--accounting for the origin and nature of the universe (or at least some part of these things).

** what ideas will we have in another 100 yrs? 1k yrs? 10k yrs?

*** yeah, I'm not going to worry about the endgame. There's lots of time to figure that out. There isn't much time for some other things, though.

* i want to put together a philosophy intro pack for new software teams.

** I'm worried that most ppl would react badly to it if I just got a bunch of curi's essays together.

** but I think there's significant and important stuff to learn.

Apparently post-mortems are common/standard in cyber incident response (sub-branch of infosec).

thinking about it now: I followed the gitlab outage in 2017 closely since I was using it at the time. They had a good post-mortem process from memory.

#18536 Yeah post-mortems for computer security breaches or web service outages help convince ppl u maybe know what ur doing and won't have the same thing happen to you again. They can help restore/preserve trust. I think that might be why they're common as public blog posts.

#18547 yup, good points. Will fix stuff on my end.

Some reflections on #18534

## title

The title ("Why I Live") is at worst dishonest and at best inaccurate. In reality my actions don't always line up with what I said in the post or the things I was planning to add in future drafts. A better title would be something like "what I want to align my life to". It was dishonest b/c I was essentially claiming to make better choices than I do. Some of my choices line up with the post, but lots don't. Not just in minor ways, but like major ways. Why procrastinate from ~everything to binge a game for like 20 hours? That's choosing the crappy path.

## context before writing

I was thinking about what curi and I had talked about in tutoring 51 + earlier stuff about goals. I realised that I hadn't really written much about my goals when curi and I discussed that topic (2 sessions mostly I think). What I'd done was closer to writing my goals down as opposed to writing about them. The 'why I live' post is closer to talking about my goals, but there's a lot of implicit stuff. I think the implicit stuff (which relates to me personally) is fine because the post was meant to be more general than about my specific goals, more like framework/context stuff that informs what goals I think are good or not and why.

I was thinking about being unhappy with not writing, and about my goals and prioritisation etc. I had some thoughts like 'why be unhappy with it, you could work towards that now', and 'write about goals instead of just writing them down'. I started brainstorming and came up with the title and stuff later.

## misc

### emotions

I had some anxiety when I checked the next morning for posts on curi (because I hoped there'd be some feedback) - even before knowing whether any were in microblogging. That was unexpected and notable.

I wonder if there's some interaction going on between:

- my desire for a life with meaning / greatness

- fear of failure / mistakes (i'm not sure how much I feel this but it's a pretty common static meme)

- the idea of choosing to fail (deliberately not trying) instead of trying and failing

- my desire for lacking responsibility sometimes -- it's not persistent but I sometimes want it so much that I renege on commitments or withdraw and ignore msgs and things. That behaviour doesn't go beyond reason but is definitely to some extent.

I was also surprised when I thought that the post might be dishonest/misleading. Part of me wasn't, but part of me was because a lot of the stuff in the post (or stuff that's implied by or implicit in it) are things that I want to believe about myself.

#### insight?

If I believe things about myself that are better than the situation in reality actually is, does that inhibit error correction substantially? Can it hide blockers that would otherwise be more apparent and easier to fix?

I feel 'yes' is the answer for some things.

Obvs thinking e.g. I'm 50th percentile playing poker when I'm actually 35th percentile isn't going to matter much, esp compared to thinking I'm 99th percentile but actually 90th percentile (which would have potentially *big* consequences for variance, consistency, and volume of earnings).

In this case I think it might be an issue b/c thinking I make better life choices than I do (and do so more consistently) can mean I am overconfident, which could have consequences like starting big projects too early / without enough planning / etc.

Maybe, then, this 'insight' is just like another aspect of overreaching and Oism?

### 'negative' feedback?

I'd like to know if anyone thought it was low quality, overreaching, vapid, dishonest, etc.

I don't think FI ppl would have avoided telling me this in abstract, but I could see ppl not providing feedback if they thought like 'there are so many issues it'd be effort to know where to start' or the like.

I think the dynamics between curi and I might be different b/c of the tutoring sessions -- like anything that needs to be discussed could be done there. I don't know how/if this would affect something in particular, but it occurs to me now & might be relevant.

### writing

on the whole I didn't think the writing was too bad considering it was a draft. There are some things that I don't think are clear enough from what I wrote; e.g. intended audience. I wonder if I might write a less clear post if there are conflicting goals for the post. e.g. I wanted to write something for me (to spur myself on, as such), and I also wanted to write something that could become enduring (after more drafts) and would be useful or general in a philosophy-and-life type category. Maybe I'd do better by separating the two; writing at all helps me some, and I can do some of the more self-centric stuff in private journaling or in the brainstorming phase and copy those bits elsewhere s.t. they wouldn't be in the main post.

I also wonder if I'm overreaching at this stage trying to create anything that's enduring. I suspect there's not much I can do with a low enough ER s.t. it lasts decades.

Actually, there's lots I could do like that, just not stuff that I'm interested in doing. e.g. I could write a guide on how & why to tie your shoelaces could be enduring on the scale of decades. i think I might do myself a service by lowering those standards for a while. I can always revisit them later and I don't need to have them to actually produce enduring work (you can always go above your own standards).

I wrote this as part of a post on reach + IGCs. This was 95% of the post at the point I copied it out; it seems better as a stand alone post.

I think reach is parameterised over infinite domains. I explain what I mean by that below. I don't know if this is right, but **I would be surprised if it were wrong**, so I would like to know if anyone disagrees.

---

When an explanation has reach, it means the explanation is general over many problems or situations. The exact nature of this generality is particular to the explanation.

One example of reach is theories which are time-independent and/or space-independent; maybe a theory works everywhere and at all times (at the beginning of the universe, and now, and we expect it will in 100 billion years and onwards), like general relativity or quantum theory; or maybe a theory works regardless of the time of day ('if I dial the emergency number someone will pick up, but only if people commonly have and use phones', 'leaving food on the stove will heat it, then cook it, then burn it, and then set fire to it')

Reach can be mundane and fantastical. All explanations have some level of reach.

It's hard (or impossible) to compare explanations' reach without a common phenomena to use as a basis. Does a theory of housing in post-GFC North America have more or less reach than a theory of sodium's role in the ionosphere? I don't know if that question has an answer. What about newtonian gravity and general relativity? It's reasonable to say that GR has more reach because GR explains phenomena which newtonian gravity does not, *and the reverse is not true*; GR is an explanatory superset.

Reach has a size, but it's hard to be exact besides 'zero' and 'infinite'. It doesn't really make sense for reach to be ever be completely zero (b/c the explanation would not account for anything). If an explanation has little reach then it only accounts for very specific things (it's parochial). Explanations can also have unbounded reach. Sometimes it might seem like explanations have near-unbounded reach (e.g. newtownian gravity seemed unbounded *except* for the orbit of Mercury). In reality, we can't reliably tell the difference between 'near-unbounded' and 'parochial' without a superior understanding of what's going on (which requires additional explanations).

Reach is parameterised over infinite domains. That's because those domains correspond to--a least--levels of emergence. Some domains are subsets/supersets of other domains, but they can be incomparable too. Example: natural selection has some domain like 'all life on earth with a genome' (it might be even more specific than this, though). natural selection also has some domain in time and space; we expect natural selection will work in many other contexts too, like some alien life, provided it meets certain conditions. It's possible that alien life might not meet those conditions, like hyper-advanced bioengineered AGIs. It's not clear how natural selection would work here, and we can recognise that b/c we know something about the bounds of it's reach. We can reason about what domains of reach an explanation has by exploring the explanation (thoughts, experiments, predicts, etc).

We don't care that explanations have zero reach in some domains. General Relativity doesn't really have anything to do with housing prices in the USA. So even though GR has some universal reach WRT time and space (AFAIK; galaxy rotation rates aside), it has 0 reach WRT housing prices. (It does have reach when it comes to houses themselves; you still experience gravity when building houses and when inside houses etc, and need to take it in to account.)

If an explanation has reach over *some complete domain* we say it *has universality*. I don't know if the domain needs to be infinite, but it seems like many important universalities have an infinite domain. Some universalities are special and some seem like they're not special. Some important domains of universalities are: all matter at all points in space and time, all computable programs, all programs, all real numbers, all people, all alphabets, all ideas, etc.

curi once said:

> X is a universal Y if it can do any Z that any other Y can do.

I could say: This turing machine is a universal computer because can compute any program that any other computer can compute. The universality is *all computable programs*.

Or: Paths Forward is a universal discussion methodology because it can lead to a successful conversation for all conversations that any other discussion methodology can lead to success in. (I don't know if this is actually true yet, but I suspect it is and would be surprised if it were false)

---

# short reflective post script

I *think* I have used terminology correctly but there are parts I'm not certain about. An example: When I talk about domains and universalities I'm reasonably confident the terms are close-to-right (or actually right / okay / clear), but wouldn't be surprised if there were minor issues. I would be surprised if there were major issues.

I think there's a difference between people who actually exist and people who will exist.

You can harm both, and the rights and life of both matter. However, I don't think future people can be thought about as individuals. Like you can *collectively* harm future ppl, but you can't harm an *individual* future person.

This is relevant for stuff like abortion, AGI, thinking about one's choices and what to do in life.

> Example: if you have bad fine motor skills then you will have a lower limit on how fast you can type; errors in precise finger movements (or precise-but-slow finger movements) disproportionately affect your typing speed (compared to precise-and-fast finger movements).

I found an error w/ the noun phrase "errors in precise finger movements (or precise-but-slow finger movements)". It's a noun phrase b/c it's the subject of the main verb 'affect' in that clause. It sounds like I'm saying: errors in [precise or precise-but-slow] finger movements. This is because I use two incomparable nouns (those being errors in finger movements and finger movements). This error also affected the sentence later on where I say "compared to precise-and-fast finger movements". This doesn't strictly make sense b/c the subject of the clause is errors. I expect that--given this particular error--most people would do background error correction to fix the sentence or would just gloss over it.

I would fix the clause so that the subject is [errors or successes when doing X]:

Example: if you have bad fine motor skills then you will have a lower limit on how fast you can type; errors in precise finger movements and successful precise-but-slow finger movements will disproportionately affect your typing speed compared to successful precise-and-fast finger movements.

Revisiting the sentence now, I would consider replacing 'finger movements' with 'key strokes' but I think that it's not a big deal and doesn't significantly impact the post.

One of the dangers of having unconventional views on academia is that you can end up in a situation where you don't produce a track record of thinking / ideas / research efforts. Academia and the associated journal-article norms is the primary method ppl use to establish a track record of serious research and having/presenting pioneering ideas.

I think rejecting uni culture is one reason I have ended up writing so little up till now; I had issues with some aspects from the start but I got more critical over a few years until I dropped out. (Tho I've been tempted twice by offers of a shortcut to postgrad stuff: first a masters of geoscience and second a PhD in compsci focusing on blockchain stuff. There are circumstances where you can do postgrad stuff without an undergrad degree -- basically if someone will vouch for and supervising you. Skipping the BS was one reason I considered it more fully.)

I tried to do some writing after dropping out but never found it easy and I wanted talk about topics beyond my writing skill. I don't think doing the normal undergrad-to-phd-to-research thing would have fixed all those issues (I'm still critical of academia), but I would have ended up with a track record at least.

I think my lack of a track record has been significantly detrimental to me more than once.

#18587

I'm a bit tired writing this, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some small mistakes, but I spent some time going over it so I'm confident there's no big mistakes.

> 1. Is being able to tell when you're prone to making mistakes the same thing as having good self-judgment or is it a type of good self-judgment?

I think it's a sub-skill of good self-judgement, sort of like a component. There are some edge-case situations though, like when you're new to something. Those situations might not need the full 'good self-judgement' skill b/c there's like no part of it you should be confident in. But in general good self-judgement is more than just being able to tell when you're prone to making mistakes.

Another way to think of it is: it's a type of *self-judgement*. having *good self-judgement* means being proficient at *a few key types of self-judgement*.

I think the next answer might help clarify things.

> 2. What do you mean by "Being able to judge your own learning cycle"? Judge what about your learning cycle?

I will answer this Q then reflect on it.

Answer:

To have an efficient learning cycle *without help* means you need to be able to make 2 types of decision well.

The first type is decisions about focus. "Which things should you focus on and what stage of the learning cycle should you focus on for each?"

The second type is decisions about when to change focus, for both topics and methods.

Particularly, you want to make good decisions/judgements about when you can transition from step 1 to step 2, and from step 2 to step 3, and when you're done. If you don't make good decisions then you either move on too soon and end up with compounding errors, or you move on too late and waste time (or maybe get bored with the topic in general). I think the first problem is much more common than the second.

Doing each learning step well means you'll probably use a different method for each step. So you have to choose to stop doing method 2 and start doing method 3 at some point, and if you make a better decision there then you'll have better results w/ learning.

Both of those decision types (what to focus on and when to move on) are dependent on self-judgement. Good self-judgement means you'll be able to make better decisions. There might be other contextual factors too, but good self-judgement is *always* a factor.

Being able to make those decisions well is what I mean by "being able to judge your own learning cycle".

Reflection:

I considered if "Being able to judge your own learning cycle" was vague when writing/editing the post. I chose to keep it like that b/c I thought it was clear enough and b/c writing less means both finishing sooner and fewer chances for mistakes to occur.

My answer to (2) is pretty long. In part that's b/c I wanted to be extra clear but it also shows how much I left unsaid.

I think it might have been a minor mistake to omit more details when I considered if the idea was vague. I don't think it was a big mistake b/c it was easy to fix.

That said, what are the expectations we should have around mistakes that arise due to audience mismatch? It's really hard to write for super broad audiences, so I should expect some background miscommunication with like ~most audiences, right?

I think I need to understand more about audiences, miscommunication, and stuff about expected (or acceptable) errors and their properties (like their magnitude and type).

(note: this is a draft I wrote yesterday. I think I was intending on adding more. That said, it's a complete idea as it is and relevant to my reply to #18593, so I decided to post it now.)

wrt learning and overreaching: sometimes we'd be surprised by some errors but not others. I'm not surprised by subtle grammar mistakes in stuff I write, but usually the topic isn't about grammar. So I can sometimes be confident of a low error rate in the content but not in the grammar. If there's a difference in my expectations on which errors would be surprising, I should say so and commit before errors are found.

I had this thought after the US election:

The payouts for bets on Trump/Biden winning varied throughout the election, and was >2 for both of them at some point. If you can place any two bets (one for each candidate) where the payout is >2 then you guarantee profit (overheads aside). You should balance the bets on each side too.

Payouts being >2 mean that you get more than $2 back for a bet of $1.

Events with *sufficient variance* (or uncertainty) sound like they should generally work with this strategy.

> Category theory offers a unifying framework for information modeling that can facilitate the translation of knowledge between disciplines.

> Category Theory for the Sciences is intended to create a bridge between the vast array of mathematical concepts used by mathematicians and the models and frameworks of such scientific disciplines as computation, neuroscience, and physics.

https://archive.org/details/cattheory

#18602

> Okay, here are some comments about content and clarity in #18579. Keep in mind that I’m not skilled at writing essays and I don’t think I could write a good several-paragraph essay.

Thanks :). FYI I found I was able to improve relatively quickly with some practice (or at least that's how it feels). I'm not sure what you've tried or how important it is to you. I'm happy to help or give suggestions/feedback and things if you think that would be good.

> - It seems like the main idea of the essay is that good self-judgment is important for learning. But learning isn’t mentioned in the first paragraph. I think your first paragraph should have your main idea in it.

I was initially confused till I went back and checked. The first sentence is "One of the most important skills for life is good self-judgement." I agree that I don't explicitly mention the self-judgement <-> learning connection in the first paragraph, but I think I could modify the first line with the following to fix things: "... important skills for effective learning (and life in general) is good self-judgement."

>> One of the most important skills for life is good self-judgement. Having good self-judgement means that you're able to tell when you're prone to making mistakes (and what they are) or when it's safe to be confident in doing something with a low error rate.

> - I asked my first question in #18587 because in your second sentence, “means” can be read two different ways. The sentence could mean “having good self-judgment implies that you’re able to tell…” or “having good self-judgment is defined as being able to tell…”

Ahh, I think I understand, maybe. I read the sentence just now with two different groupings:

- having X means you're able to tell (when Y or when Z)

- having X means (you're able to tell when Y or when Z)

I'm not sure the 2nd way is grammatically valid b/c I have a "when" on both phrases either side of the "or".

I can sort of see the difference between implies and defined as, but not exactly sure I see it here. I think I might be able to avoid this sort of ambiguity anyway, generally.

other thoughts on this q:

FTR I meant: having X implies you can tell (when Y or when Z).

I don't know if I should use "and" here instead of "or". I used "or" b/c I think it goes with "when". If I used "and" instead, I would replace "when" with "the times when".

The "or" version means approximately "you can tell between these situations" and the "and" version means approximately "you can identify both of these situations". The different is subtle, but maybe it's important here. The "or" version (as I've put it here) sort of sounds like only those two options are possible.

---

Comments/Qs I'll respond to later:

(I'm a little short on time but wanted to post something)

> - Re my second question in #18587 [...]

> - I think a better main idea would be something like “being able to judge your error rate is important for learning”. [...]

> - I don’t think the example of fine motor skills and typing is a good one here. [...]

Your qs and comments were helpful btw. I don't know when I would have noticed the life/learning thing in the first line for example.

Philosophy who needs it. CH 2 or 3 (CH 3 in audible book). 26:50 / 35:30

I'm open to any discussions or suggestions on this topic.

#18605

>>> One of the most important skills for life is good self-judgement. Having good self-judgement means that you're able to tell when you're prone to making mistakes (and what they are) or when it's safe to be confident in doing something with a low error rate.

>> - I asked my first question in #18587 because in your second sentence, “means” can be read two different ways. The sentence could mean “having good self-judgment implies that you’re able to tell…” or “having good self-judgment is defined as being able to tell…”

> Ahh, I think I understand, maybe. I read the sentence just now with two different groupings:

> - having X means you're able to tell (when Y or when Z)

> - having X means (you're able to tell when Y or when Z)

> I'm not sure the 2nd way is grammatically valid b/c I have a "when" on both phrases either side of the "or".

I don't see the difference between these two groupings. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that I don't get it. That's not what I was getting at.

> I can sort of see the difference between implies and defined as, but not exactly sure I see it here. I think I might be able to avoid this sort of ambiguity anyway, generally.

> other thoughts on this q:

> FTR I meant: having X implies you can tell (when Y or when Z).

A way to reword it to make the implication clear is "If you have good self-judgment, then you'll be able to tell when..."

> I don't know if I should use "and" here instead of "or". I used "or" b/c I think it goes with "when". If I used "and" instead, I would replace "when" with "the times when".

I did not see this point at first, but now I do.

> The "or" version means approximately "you can tell between these situations" and the "and" version means approximately "you can identify both of these situations". The different is subtle, but maybe it's important here. The "or" version (as I've put it here) sort of sounds like only those two options are possible.

I've learned from FI to see subtle differences in wording as important. Which one did you mean to say? Do you want to say that only those two options are possible?

A possible "or" rewording that's wordy but more clear: "... you're able to tell if you're in a situation where you're prone to making mistakes or in one where you can be confident that you'll have a low error rate."

A possible "and" rewording: "... you can identify both where you're prone to making mistakes and where you're unlikely to make mistakes."

I've thought for a long time that choices are epistemically significant; even before I had a good idea of what 'epistemically' means. One of the first ways I remember thinking about this was wrt determinism and free-will. My idea was roughly: if a person *chooses* to believe in (and thus have) free-will, then they do have it, and if they choose not to, then they don't. I don't think that's strictly correct, but I do think there's an essence of truth insofar as the believe that your problems are soluble is required to seek solutions. If you don't seek solutions to your problems then your life will be ruled by static-memes and other things. Those ideas take away your control and autonomy over your life (at least in particular partial ways).

I think Rand agrees that choices are epistemically significant in some way. From *Philosophy: Who Needs It* (p 45, kindle edition):

> A man does not have to be a worthless scoundrel, but so long as he chooses to be, he *is* a worthless scoundrel and must be treated accordingly; to treat him otherwise is to contradict a *fact*. A man does not have to be a heroic achiever; but so long as he chooses to be, he *is* a heroic achiever and must be treated accordingly; to treat him otherwise is to contradict a *fact*.

I'm pleased that there seems to be some convergence between what Rand has said and my draft 'Why I Live' post (#18534), esp considering I wrote my draft before starting *Philosophy*. I think that's probably due largely to learning from curi and consuming his content. (e.g. repeatedly returning to think on the topic 'helping the best ppl or helping the masses'.)

Note: I'm unsure about my honesty with this next paragraph. I didn't want to cut it, though, in case anyone has some criticisms of it, or has suggestions of things to consider when one is self-doubtful in this way. I'm using a blockquote to signal that it's different from the rest of the post.

> I've repeatedly thought about whether and how choices matter, and one reason for that is my enduring dissatisfaction with how I've been treated (particularly wrt academics or 'intelligence'). I've largely been treated well, and often preferentially, going back almost as far as I can remember. My current explanation for that dissatisfaction is that I think my success has had more to do with my choices than innate ability. I don't know how early that started, though. I have an example about explicitly choosing to change my attitude and approach to an aspect of life from when I was 13, so I think I must have had some important ideas before that.

I still think choices matter, and also that the choice to believe *choices matter* is epistemically significant.

There's a deluge of bad ideas waiting to flood one's mind if one doesn't take one's choices seriously.

I was reading the FI thread "Reading Until the First Error" and start to consider writing a post on the topic. Then I wondered what would happen if a few FI ppl chose a common topic and wrote collaboratively on that topic. Would a better post be produced than if any one of those ppl attempted it individually?

It's unlikely the final post would be near identical to any individual author's attempt unless that author were a lot more knowledgeable on the topic.

If none of then authors are an outlier like that, and if the authors have paths forward, then the collaborative post should be better than any individual attempt. Also, the process of resolving disagreements (done to completion) should mean the authors sort of 'sync up' all their relevant knowledge, which would make writing it a good learning exercise, too.

I'm not sure how this would work in practice, but I'd be interested to find out if anyone else is interested in doing something like this (I am).

There are some possible issues, like if there's a significant mismatch between the authors that could mean the process is inefficient. Or if the topic is too advanced the process could fail but hide sources of error. Topic choice is pretty important, then.

I'm curious about any examples of competition between static memes, particularly b/c I want to know how they interact.

curi:

> Static (aka anti-rational) memes *disable the holder's creativity* to prevent criticism of themselves. They are *not adapted to be useful*, but block effective thinking about that. Their focus is on making the host unable to reject the meme.

curi explicitly qualifies the criticism that's prevented with "of themselves", which is pretty important for static memes if they're competing. It's an advantage if a static meme can avoid preventing (or even encourage) criticism of a competing static meme without compromising the suppression of criticism aimed at it.

I think that's a easy-to-miss point about static memes and maybe a good reason to use the term `static meme` over `anti-rational meme`.

Hooking is a useful technique for learning.

The name is taken from programming; a "hook" is the relationship and entry point for new functionality. That functionality is added after the original software is written (usually by a different programmer).

Hooks are common in programming. In user interface frameworks like React or Vue, hooks to lifecycle events can be made. Those hooks let the programmer add code that runs before or after meaningful things happen, like before the page is loaded, or after all the assets (like images) have been displayed on the screen. When using Git, hooks like "prepare-commit-msg" and "post-update" allow programmers to run scripts before and after some of the steps in Git's procedures.

In programming, the hooks that are chosen are at important breakpoints. Roughly, they are the last and first moments around a significant event. There are guarantees about things that have happened and things that will (or might) happen -- something possible only because significant breakpoints were chosen.

When learning, we can do something similar, where we can introduce ideas based on noticing some event. Adding hooks to certain actions, thoughts, etc allow us to introduce ideas at that specific point, without the overhead of trying to keep the idea in mind.

One example is forgetting to use the word 'that'. Maybe you notice [that] you sometimes omit 'that' and you think that your writing is less clear because of it. If you choose a breakpoint like 'when proofreading I needed to reread a sentence', you can hook the idea 'check for missing implied words'. You're not constantly looking for implied words, but you are ready to add that behaviour when you hit that breakpoint.

The words 'breakpoint' has a meaning in both programming and CR, and I want to clarify that I'm using it in the CR sense. It aligns fairly intuitively with the programming sense, but with programming you act on a breakpoint differently (e.g. debugging via stepping through code and looking at memory). That idea is not specific enough.

In CR, a breakpoint is a boundary on a spectrum (or pseudo-spectrum) which allows you to make yes/no judgements about IGCs and to effectively deal with continuous/unbounded data.

With hooking, the spectrum* that these breakpoints segment* is your thoughts and actions, the idea is the relevant methods of feedback and error correction, and the goal is to avoid the relevant error and to continue avoiding it.

*: 'Spectrum' and 'segment' are (I think) specific to 1d shapes. You'd probably need more than one dimension to represent all possible thoughts and actions. However, that distinction isn't really relevant here; the principle is the same.

It's usually easy for programmers to make good guesses about which hooks are useful (and thus good guesses for which breakpoints are useful). The important thing is that the programmer has good explanations for why hooking here in this context is worthwhile. Sometimes there are explanations with reach, like why hooks between initialization and runtime logic are useful.

It's harder to tell where hooks should go (where to put breakpoints) when it comes to learning. To make good judgements about where hooks go requires that you have a good explanation. That, in turn, requires you understand how to detect, correct, and ultimately avoid those errors. This means hooking is hard to use well when you're just starting to learn a topic. to judge that you need enough knowledge about both learning generally and the topic that you're studying. This means it's good for stage 2 learning (consistency).

Making a bad judgement about where hooks should go can have high cost. One reason to use hooks is that you want to conditionally introduce behaviour with a high overhead. That behaviour doesn't need to be high overhead on its own; maybe it's only high overhead when you have 3 other ideas in mind that you're focusing on. If you're triggering a badly placed hook (at a bad breakpoint) then you will often have the overhead of considering error correction that doesn't actually help. If you don't realise that the hook is badly placed quickly then the cumulative cost can hold your learning back.

I'm considering a new project: writing a series of blog posts about learning. One goal is that I could, if I wanted, turn that series into a book later (if it was good enough, substantial enough, etc). Making a profit (e.g. by selling a book-book) is not a goal.

#18679 Note: forgot to add my name to this post.

My normal procedure for posting here, based on some of the things Alisa wrote on this topic, is: fill in topic if relevant, fill in name, start writing, if the post get's too long then copy to a text editor and copy back when done.

The problem with #18679 was that I didn't do my normal procedure. I clicked 'reply' on #18656 first, then decided I wanted to quote instead so clicked quote. After that I just started writing. I ended up copying that to a text editor and copying back once I was done. Then I clicked 'post message' like my normal procedure.

If I introduced a 'check fields' step before submitting I could have avoided this mistake.

> I didn't realise the relevant section in *Enlightenment Now* is v. similar until checking just now.

I misspoke here. I meant: I didn't realise the relevant question from this section ("why should I live?") is v. similar to the title I was thinking about ("why live?").

I was focusing a bit on quoting text from curi's pdf and pinker's ebook at that time, so I think I just changed context too much while writing and dropped some words. I sometimes switch context like that in the middle of a sentence; that will definitely increase my error rate unless I go back and do editing later (which is higher effort than doing it well the first time for simple stuff like this). I could either finish the sentence then go do the thing (like copying quotes) or when I return to a half-done sentence I could re-write the entire sentence. I think the second option might be a bit better for the end result. That said I should remember to think about the overhead of switching like that sometime and check it's not like much higher than I estimate.

#18688

> I don’t want to pay to put it on curi’s blog.

I'm curious about this. Why do you say that?

I wasn't expecting to share the cost btw. I'm not sure if that was clear or not. If you also didn't think we were sharing the cost, though, then wouldn't it make sense to think I would pay for the whole thing? Qs that come to mind: do you disagree with *me* paying for it? or maybe with having the discussion in a venue that cost money? would it make a difference if curi created a suitable topic without being paid?

What do you think?

> we pick a topic that’s easy and not try to say too much about it this time.

I think this is a good idea; I was ready to consider topics that I would consider writing about alone. The problem with that is those topics are *already* near the edge of my limit. Since I don't have much practice doing collaborative stuff, the only safe thing to presume is that a collaborative effort is also near the edge of my limit. Doing a complex topic, then, means I/we would risk overreaching or at least making EC harder.

When I read this idea earlier today I immediately thought about my writing practice during the tutorials. At the time I was a bit reluctant to write about shoes and swimming and things, but it was really valuable b/c it meant a bunch of issues got teased out in a manageable way.

There are a ~dozen left over writing topics I didn't do in some of my tutorial nodes. Do any of these seem like good topics to you or give you ideas for topics? They're at the bottom of: https://xertrov.github.io/fi/notes/2020-08-12/#previous-possible-exercises---not-done-was-previous-homework

> Your original post about this (#18630) said “a few FI people”. Is anyone else interested?

I'm not against more ppl getting involved if they'd like to (esp if it turns out to be valuable), tho I do think it'll be easier with fewer people to start with.

#18703

> I just don't want to pay anything because there are free places we could put it that seem fine to me.

Oh yeah ofc.

> I think it would be fine to do it on your site if you are willing

I don't mind, though I'm developing a new site ATM that's more like curi.us in terms of functions/features. If we use my site I'd like to avoid doing too much before I swap over (which helps avoid migration concerns). The new site is not a static site like my current sites are; having a static site makes doing comments more difficult.

> I've been checking this thread once a day. I'll start checking it more often.

Cool. Keep in mind our TZ differences (i'm +11 atm; otherwise +10); I think we're about 8 hours apart. I'll also set the title as I did here for related comments. I'm busy the next 24 hrs or so.

#18709

@Anne, I thought we might be getting stuck and listing current potential problems seems like a good way to avoid that (or start at least).

- A place for a dedicated discussion. I sort of expect it to be high volume. Do you also expect that?

- Topic choice -- there's plenty of stuff that comes to mind about what *I* personally want to write about, but I get stuck suggesting something. Maybe we could each brainstorm some topics that are simple that we don't know too much about. Then we could swap lists/trees and pick ones that sounded good from each other's list? That should work as long as we end up with 1 or more topics.

- We might have an issue with latency and work volume? Like if we have trouble being synchronous (there aren't many good overlapping times I suspect) then slow / low volume messages means writing will take longer. Smaller and easier topics will help get to a result faster and move on to a new topic (repeating the cycle as many times as we like).

- Maybe the potential size/difficulty is a bit intimidating? I want to do it because I think I can learn something about learning and/or discussing. I also want to make progress in both those things regardless, so I'm slightly worried that maybe it's inefficient. An easier topic will help there. Also, nothing bad will happen if we pick something too easy.

In highlights 4, curi talks a bit about learning philosophy and helping the world (particularly w/ philosophy). At 11:15 he says (my words) that mistakes in philosophy impact your philosophy progress a lot and mean your efforts aren't very productive -- I think there's an implication that this is not the case for most/all other things (which makes sense to me).

I think these 2 reasons contribute:

- philosophy is not very mechanical. it's not like getting better at replicating something straight forward like practicing speedrunning tech.

- philosophy has like high inertia or poor/slow feedback. stuff like speedrunning / maths / coding all have very fast feedback cycles: once you 'finish' you learn whether you were successful or not fairly quickly. philosophy is like the other end of the spectrum, though, and errors can go a really long time without being noticed.

#learning

I've started writing a postmortem on my onerednail.com thing.

The problem seems fairly simple now:

on the site I say something like: ideas matter, and that wearing a red nail polish on a particular finger is the symbol I'd chosen for that. particularly I say:

> To be a *responsible* thinker requires accepting this, because without doing so you would deny yourself the most powerful method of *error correction* we have. We must *live the consequences* of our ideas and morality, strive for their betterment, and understand the consequences of the alternative.

the problem is that this does not line up with behaviour. if I value philosophy, why have I not been writing and learning and doing any of it? I *thought* I was, but it was superficial. what I *should* be doing (living the consequence of my ideas) is dedicating time and effort and things to actually doing philosophy.

> The red fingernail is -- for me -- a dedication to those ideas and values.

Not anymore. Now it's more of a reminder about *faking* that dedication.

> It is a declaration of responsibility, and a desire to accept it.

It was an *abdication* of responsibility, and a desire to *believe* I accepted it, even if that was because I was *fooling myself*.

(Minor grammar mistake: I say the red nail is a desire, where I should have said "a symbol of my desire" or something like that.)

*Was it bad to do it though?*

First, I don't think it was *wrong* to do. Like I didn't think it went against any of my principles, it was at least the *claim* that philosophy was important - which is good - and it didn't hurt anyone.

The idea has serious problems, so it's bad in that sense.

However, it did succeed at some things. This one particularly:

> It is a reminder of the importance of philosophy and epistemology in daily life, [...]

It did do this. I paused for thought and considered things more deeply than I would have otherwise. It was a direct part of some significant events b/c *I was bothered when I thought my actions didn't line up with the symbol.* There would have been some significant thoughts I woudln't have had, and actions I wouldn't have done, if I decided not to do it in the first place.

For that reason *I don't regret the mistake, and I would be happy to make the same mistake if I didn't know better.*

----

This was meant to be a gist-icle (short/summary-ish) but it's longer than I anticipated. I'm going to post to FI about it b/c I think it's important enough. I'm not sure if I'll think of more to add, though.

She also says

> To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is ..., rare, ...

I think "rare" is the wrong word. "Scarce" is better. I don't think this represents a major error on her (or my) part tho.

#18714

>@Anne, I thought we might be getting stuck and listing current potential problems seems like a good way to avoid that (or start at least).

> - A place for a dedicated discussion. I sort of expect it to be high volume. Do you also expect that?

High volume is okay. Maybe somehow that will push me to think and write faster.

You're working on a place for a dedicated discussion, right?

> - Topic choice -- there's plenty of stuff that comes to mind about what *I* personally want to write about, but I get stuck suggesting something. Maybe we could each brainstorm some topics that are simple that we don't know too much about. Then we could swap lists/trees and pick ones that sounded good from each other's list? That should work as long as we end up with 1 or more topics.

Okay, I'm willing to do this. But see below about topics.

> - We might have an issue with latency and work volume? Like if we have trouble being synchronous (there aren't many good overlapping times I suspect) then slow / low volume messages means writing will take longer. Smaller and easier topics will help get to a result faster and move on to a new topic (repeating the cycle as many times as we like).

Actually, we seem to have a good chunk of overlapping time. You're still posting things now as I write this and I've been awake for nine hours. Should we set up times to work together? Should we do some voice chat as well as text?

> - Maybe the potential size/difficulty is a bit intimidating? I want to do it because I think I can learn something about learning and/or discussing. I also want to make progress in both those things regardless, so I'm slightly worried that maybe it's inefficient. An easier topic will help there. Also, nothing bad will happen if we pick something too easy.

I too am hoping to learn something about learning and/or discussing, and also about writing.

I think we should aim first for something too easy. Maybe we should first look for easy topics that we already have something to say about, not topics we'd have to research.

I've brainstormed some topics. Some of them require research and some don't.

Maybe we should hold off on doing more until we have our dedicated place for the project.

https://youtu.be/2xUcSFh4IkU?t=1194 - curi Philosophy Stream Highlights #4

> And a lot of times the first time someone gets majorly stuck, they stay stuck forever and it starts changing them.

There are a few ~common sense type analogies that come to mind. Like with jogging there's the idea of 'don't slow down because you won't be able to start up again'. Both jogging and learning are endurance activities. You have to maintain like a consistent minimum to keep going, or if you slow down too much you have to try way harder to get going again. A good attitude can make that easier but it's never free.

The foundation of a good learning strategy must include staying unstuck.

Your reaction time to getting stuck is like an overhead on learning. It's ~randomly distributed so on average it's like a *constant* overhead. A constant overhead *you can remove*.

You can't predict where you'll get stuck (or when or how often), but you *can* get better at staying unstuck. If you don't get better, then you get ~random periods of being stuck with ~random durations. If you just wait for them to resolve themselves your rate of progress will tend to 0.

I once summarised part of BoI as "the alternative to problem solving is death". The alternative to staying unstuck is a wasted life.

Everyone can get better at being unstuck. It's not like a super abstract idea that's out of reach. It's easy to start. Easier than you think, and there's always a new option to try. The hard part is being honest enough with yourself to start; *believing* you can take the next step, rather than actually taking it. (Don't know where to start? Don't know any techniques? Don't know if you're stuck? That's your starting point. Ask questions. Seek answers. That's part of why FI exists, so you have a place to do that.)

If you're stuck, give yourself the chance to get unstuck. You can't rely on other people looking out for you. Sometimes you can't even rely on *you* to look out you. Take matters into your own hands. Your life depends on it. You depend on it. Get unstuck.

#18727 Yes.

I am having a moment of excitement b/c I wanted to note that

gem of seeing and self-judgement are relevant things I want to link -- **things I wrote**. I feel like I have a very tiny library. But I didn't know what it felt like to have a library before. I'm very happy right now.

#18728 Great!

BTW i've been using it but idk if *library* is the best word. I don't know many good options but there's one good word which may be better: *archive*.

I think most ppl have a focus issue when it comes to thinking about errors in discussions/debates.

Errors in what other ppl say are not very interesting. But errors in what *you* say should be v. interesting *to you*. (And similarly, errors in what *I* say are very interesting to *me*.)

If you're debating someone, and they make 10 errors and you make 2 errors: how should you feel about that?

I think you should feel the same regardless of whether they made 0 errors, 10 errors, or 100 errors. You made 2 errors, and that's what you should care about. There's no such thing as "winning" if you're making mistakes; for win-win you want to have had those mistakes corrected before the end of the discussion. Those 2 errors are the only things that *you* are able to improve *without relying on others*. They're the only errors you can guarantee that you can fix. You have to be aware of them too, but after that you can fix them.

Say you have a conversation transcript of you debating someone. You show that to someone and ask for feedback. When you're being given feedback, what should you want the the focus of the feedback to be on?

The bad (but common) way of thinking about this is to want the reviewer to *agree* with you, and say things like 'your opponent was bad' and 'your arguments were good'. A little bit of that is okay, and some discussion of the opponents are okay when it's relevant.

**But!** *The **only** part of the reviewers feedback that will **actually** help you is the reviewer's **criticisms of your arguments**.*

Praise will never help you.

Criticism of the opponent will rarely help you.

The only thing that will consistently and reliably help you become a better thinker, discussion partner, debater, and philosopher is *criticism of your own errors*.

#18740 Computer programming has something kinda like a library of criticism: a *test suite*. Maybe in philosophy it could be called a *test suite for ideas*.

Nearly all mistakes we make aren't a big deal as one-off-mistakes. There are exceptions, like if you crash a car (you might kill someone). Maybe doing/learning philosophy, too. Mistakes are inevitable, so for most things making ~zero mistakes long-term isn't practical and might make that thing harder.

If mistakes are going to happen, they have to happen at least once.

I think there's a common intuition that the alternative to making a mistake only once is making the mistake 2 or 3 or 4 times, etc. *This is wrong.*

The real alternative to making a mistake once is *making a mistake infinitely many times*. That's what most people do, and that's what getting stuck is. If you make a mistake a handful of times you might not even notice it, esp. if it's not a bottleneck.

If you haven't made the choice to prioritise a learning attitude, then why would making a mistake the 2nd or 3rd or 4th time be any different to the first? If you have a learning attitude, then each mistake is an opportunity. Each mistake is *potentially* the last time you make it. If you don't have a learning attitude then you will only stop making mistakes by *~luck*.

If you don't have a learning attitude, then a new mistake is potentially the beginning of an *unbounded* series of mistakes. That will mean you have a worse life.

You should want to *avoid this situation at all costs*. Luckily, if you are stuck, you're always at the *beginning* of that unbounded series of mistakes. **You can choose to apply bounds by adopting a learning attitude!**

Everyone is at the beginning of *an* infinity. It's your *choice* whether that is *your* infinity, or your *mistakes'* infinity.

The above post/essay/thing is the longest (good) FI think I've written I think. It took me 2.5hrs to write. I don't think I was distracted for much of it, if any. I only paused a few times to think of what to say next and those times were for less than 60s (probs less than 20s but I didn't measure them). It's nearly 2000 words long, and I'm pretty happy with how I did. I think it might have more original thinking than usual which I'm excited about (the 1st/2nd order stuck, not structural epistemology).

I was considering not putting in the example when I started. I think it was probably good that I did. That said, it took longer to write because I included the example, and I'm not sure it was necessary or efficient. Either way, I do think it makes things clearer.

I forgot about the lack of list support on curi.us -- check my site for the correct indentations.

re Max's

https://xertrov.github.io/fi/posts/2020-11-20-1st-order-getting-stuck-vs-2nd-order-getting-stuck-and-structural-epistemology/

which asks:

> can two people ever learn the same thing?

see also

http://fallibleideas.com/originality

in particular the part talking about:

> here's a metaphor to help understand the issue: **everyone's mind has its own programming language.**

Note that Anthem was published in 1937, well before 1984's publication, and before seeing WWII or its aftermath with the USSR.

Yes Rand's is more realistic. Rand understands how socialism is incompatible science and wealth.

There are other kinda similar books. Everyone mentions *Animal Farm* (good IMO) and *Brave New World* (read long ago, liked it fine at the time) but not *This Perfect Day* (I liked it) or *We* (disliked first few pages, plan to try reading it again but haven't yet).

Different but kinda related is *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* which is kinda like a really short version of some of *Gulag Archipelago*. It's about the actual USSR instead of a sci-fi dystopia with some inspiration from Russian communism. Rand's *We The Living* is also about the actual USSR and it's very good and gets less attention than it deserves compared to AS and FH (it's not as good as them but it's still a great book, and for Rand's fiction AS/FH get ~all the attention).

#18841 Did you read *We*? If so, do you think it's good?

#18844 I think I was way off on the length thing here, *We* is more like 4x.

I googled for the length and this link mentions ~1hr at 500 WPM. After I posted #18844 I started to wonder how that could be accurate b/c I didn't push my speed while reading it, so the numbers started to feel wrong. This site has it at about 1hr to read, too, but 250 WPM (which sounds better) and has the length at ~15k. *We* is like 62k words.

#18841 I haven’t read *Animal Farm*, *1984*, or *Brave New World*. I did look at the below linked video summaries of them just some weeks ago. I mostly liked them. I don’t know if the summaries presnented the books well though. Maybe someone who has read the books can comment on the video summeries.

*Animal Farm*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFP1IMyKyy4

*1984*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9JIKngJnCU

*Brave New World*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raqVySPrDUE

Watching the video deroj linked on 1984 made obvious some of the major similarities it has with Anthem. like the protagonist journaling, language/thought control, a love affair, and a spark of rebellion.

I first thought that one big difference was a happy vs sad ending -- Anthem is hopeful, 1984 is not. But the reason for that, and a more significant factor, is that Rand writes about Heroes, but 1984 and similar books are about normal ppl. That's why her books end hopefully, and books like 1984 don't. I think that's also why ppl think Rand's books are unrealistic: *ppl don't believe heroes exist*. (curi's talked about ppl's complain that Roark isn't realistic, which is where I'm drawing some of these ideas from.)

A world without heroes is sad. It's a world where you can't be exceptional, you can just be better than average. A world in which you can't hope to make breakthroughs and progress, you can just push the needle a bit. It's a world for Sisyphus and sisyphites.

#18849

> I think videos like that help teach you *about* a book but they don't really help you *learn* the book. Like you don't learn the things the book has to teach you via those videos.

I agree. I think it depends on what kind of book it is and who made the video summary, but generally I think one can pick up some major themes of a book in these kinds of videos.

My goal was to learn a little bit more *about* the books, but I didn’t want to read them. They seem very depressing to me. I do not like to engage with depressing stuff.

#18852

> I agree. I think it depends on what kind of book it is and who made the video summary, but generally I think one can pick up some major themes of a book in these kinds of videos.

Yeah. Videos like that can be useful, but they're not a replacement. I watched a few more 1984 videos after those 2 last night, and if you *are* going to watch summary videos like that I think it's well worth watching 3 or 4 or more. Sort of like a second opinion on medical stuff. You don't want to get stuck b/c of one persons bad ideas.

> My goal was to learn a little bit more *about* the books, but I didn’t want to read them. They seem very depressing to me. I do not like to engage with depressing stuff.

Yeah, that seems a fair goal.

Depressing? IDK. In some ways they're the opposite b/c those things *aren't* happening, but I think I see what you mean. They're about people being broken and suffering and having things they love or value being taken away, etc.

> I do not like to engage with depressing stuff.

If that's because you don't like the impact that stuff has on you, I think that can be solved with mindset.

> > People mostly try to make their own conclusions about social status fit whatever they think that a lot of other people already concluded.

> !!!!

FH with my emphasis:

> “Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practicing it for ten years. You see it being practiced all over the world. Why are you disgusted? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity. *A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around the globe.* Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of his neighbor who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next neighbor who’ll have no desires—around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money, but for that headless monster—prestige. The approval of his fellows—their good opinion—the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus, all tentacles and no brain. Judgment, Peter? Not judgment, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes—since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand—and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick—you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted those names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time. We’ll do the originating. Vox dei. We’ll enjoy unlimited submission—from men who’ve learned nothing except to submit. We’ll call it ‘to serve.’ We’ll give out medals for service. You’ll fall over one another in a scramble to see who can submit better and more. There will be no other distinction to seek. No other form of personal achievement. Can you see Howard Roark in the picture? No? Then don’t waste time on foolish questions. Everything that can’t be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we’ll have neither God nor thought. Only voting by smiles. Automatic levers—all saying yes ... Now if you were a little more intelligent—like your ex-wife, for instance—you’d ask: What of us, the rulers? What of me, Ellsworth Monkton Toohey? And I’d say, Yes, you’re right. I’ll achieve no more than you will. I’ll have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good. Peter, my poor old friend, I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known. I have less independence than you, whom I just forced to sell your soul. You’ve used people at least for the sake of what you could get from them for yourself, I want nothing for myself. I use people for the sake of what I can do to them. It’s my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future.”

A thought on life, focus, and bottlenecks: often ppl focus on non-bottleneck parts of their life. Why? I think one reason might be that it's very difficult to "fail"; like, even if someone doesn't meet their goals, they don't experience much of a downside. So they can 'take away' only positive things. But did anything really get better for them?

Some posts I would like to make within the next week:

- postmortem: Max's December and lack of FI output

- postmortem: "wrong (and aggressive and combative)" -- this will be a postmortem on https://groups.google.com/g/fallible-ideas/c/rDEtQgxqkY8/m/BYfRRzoAAQAJ including reflection on ET's 1st reply and AF's 1st reply. /1747#18947 is involved in my reflections on aggression.

- continuing collaborative writing thread with AnneB

sometimes I get stuck writing post mortems for big things. That's b/c I want to say what the mistake was *and* explain the situation enough that my solution can be understood and judged against my reasoning. I also want to expose my reasoning to criticism but that goal can be met with a separate post, too.

sometimes corrective action (avoiding a mistake in future) is to stop doing something. these are tricky post mortems to write b/c you need a good explanation to know the full extent of what you should not-do anymore; it doesn't work to just say 'I won't do that again' if you have a really narrow idea about what 'that' is.

I'll often start writing but I get stuck with things like topic-distractions or worrying about the quality of the thing I'm writing. Sometimes I'll want to get down some thoughts about something else (mb just tangentally relevant) and end up pursuing other ideas for hours. that can be good with freewriting (particularly because you can get re-distracted so you write on a lot of topics) but it makes writing about focus-demanding topics much harder.

I spent a bit of time in December learning about photography. I hadn't had any experience before that (besides like taking average photos with phones, etc).

I feel like I've crossed a bit of a breakpoint wrt both my understanding of some fundamentals and my ability to do photograpy well. i wouldn't say that i'm good at it, though. i've taken some good photos (and mb some good video, but that's harder) though there's luck mixed in; i can't do it consistently.

here is a summary of notable points:

* i've reproduced the retina effect in bladerunner (reflections off the retina) and have had to figure out some practical stuff that i couldn't find documented. i've also found some common misconceptions around the effect that professional film makers have gotten wrong (those errors weren't constraining, though).

one example of such a misconception is that you can do colors other than the yellow/orange associated with the effect. you can't. that was easy to show: I just held colored gels in front of the relevant light source. the effect all but disappears for colors outside the red-to-yellow spectrum (v slight with green and ~0 for blue). cats eyes are different though; depending on the angle you can get lots of different colors. the colors remind me of an opal.

i also figured out how to get the effect to be active over the full frame of the image, not just a small section, and what properties you need in a lens to do that (smaller lens diameter is better).

there are some other practical considerations too, like which materials work as semi-reflective surfaces to split the light source and which orientations work or produce side effects or don't work at all. i came up with some rudimentary rules about what to do, when, how, etc.

* i took a self portrait today that I think is a good photo. I'm quite happy with it. it's my discord profile photo now and here's a larger version. There's no post-processing other than setting the color levels in photoshop (since it was taken in raw format). I hadn't use photoshop for that before so dragged some color level things around to bring out the highlights and stuff in the photo (which could have been done in-camera, too). I think that made squareish visual artifact in the top left a bit more prominent but i'm not too fussed about that atm. It was taken with an 85mm f1.4 lens with a 0.71x speedbooster (so equiv to a 60mm f1.0). the photo is actually of an acrylic semi-transparent mirror that I was using to investigate 'why are reflections in your eye always in focus but reflections in a flat mirror aren't?'

* today I figured out an answer to the above question (took about 3 hrs).

if you try and take a photo of the flat reflection of something (in a mirror; reflected from a puddle/lake) then you have focus and depth of field like taking a photo of the subject directly.

but if you take a photo of someone's eye, then you'll notice the reflections in someone's eye are also in focus. why are curved mirrors special?

i first thought there might be something to do with our eyes being wet (mb something to do with the refactive index), but that didn't seem right and would be hard to test, anyway.

i googled a bit and found a photo of bubbles and noticed the reflections were in focus there too (the bubble was also in focus). i then looked into spherical mirrors. as it turns out spherical mirrors are a bit too interesting and ppl usually talk about fun stuff rather than principles.

eventually i just watched a tutorial on convex/concave reflections and that taught me how to calculate the image created in a curved mirror. i used the back of a spoon to investigate and test some predictions.

i found that, for convex mirrors the image on it actually *isn't* all in focus at once. different objects' reflections will have different focus. however, you're not focusing on the object anymore, but the object's image. in a convex mirror, the image that's created is virtual and diminished. particularly, the infinite distance between the mirrors surface and infinity is compressed to a finite length. i think that length is distance between the surface and the center of curvature, but not 100% on that and haven't done the maths.

what's actually happening is that, since the image created by the mirror is compressed, you don't need a very large depth of field to (practically) get everything from the surface to infinity in focus at once.

so it looks like everything is in focus at once when it isn't.

i think you could use this as the basis of a new way to do macro photograph, but not sure about that. there are some other problems to solve, too. if that idea works out then you could take photos which aren't possible currently (there's an australian guy who invented a lens that can do some similar unique stuff but it seems like those lenses are like uncommon or expensive or otherwise inaccessible).

I wrote: a crit of UEG's *The Fall of a Society* and a mini essay: YouTube and Twitter are anti 'western values'.

I'm really excited at the moment and feel like I'm having a lot of ideas. I want to work on something substantial but it's midnight. I also want to write down my ideas (this being one of them).

I think writing down my ideas is good, and working on something substantial now is probs bad (bc of how it would affect sleep). I think I'm going to try doing one, and avoid doing the other, so that I don't end up coding till 5am. I can code any time (roughly) and I can't finish in 5 hrs. I could do something, but would I be a better coder now for 5 hrs, or tomorrow after sleeping? Probs tomorrow. Writing, though, is good to do now because I actually might forget new ideas.

microblogging is really good. like i think it's a much better habit to get in to than blogging. at least for me. (most of this isn in 2nd person, but it's based on self-reflection)

blogging is hard and it's hard to get started. if you want a high quality blog then it's easy to avoid publishing anything. you can also end up avoiding publishing stuff because you don't think it's good enough. sometimes that inaction is a mistake, and you might have avoided it if you had better thinking methods.

blogging is also a good way to: build up a track record, publish ideas, and get criticism. those are all things that can help in improving one's own thinking methods.

so building a blog can help improve thinking methods, but a lack of good thinking methods can get in the way of building a blog.

(before your thinking methods have improved enough, you can easily spend too much time on topics that are too hard, which can slow your progress, too.)

microblogging is a totally different mindset -- at least that's what i've found. no message is too small, but also, large posts are okay too. it's nice b/c there's fewer ideas getting in your way when you're thinking about making a post. you don't have to get every post perfect; not every idea needs to be fully developed; if you post something that you change your mind about, well, you probably didn't post a big long lengthy thing about it, so the mistake is smaller and doesn't affect things as much. It also exposes your ideas to criticism early, and helps you get ideas clearer in your mind, earlier, too. That way, it's easier to find problems before you spend too much time on things, instead of after.

I've averaged like 2 posts a year on my old blog. when i wrote a post i needed to wait for a moment of inspiration, or more recently i was lazy and only posted videos of me giving a talk in person or online. i've averaged something like 1 post a day in this thread (that'd be like ~120 of the currently 186 posts, excluding this one). there are conversations and things mixed in with ~mini-essays, but I have written (and am writing!) more than I've ever written before. it feels great.

I'm excited for the new community site b/c I want to start a permanent blog there (and redirect my old site to that new blog).

Tensegrity Explained - Steve Mould

I think there's a big problem with furinture - it's heavy and hard to move. IMO there's a decent business opportunity for anyone who can solve this and mb some other problems too. Tensegrity sounds like a reasonable approach to start with. The two other starting points I know of are: modularity + flexible construction (so the same parts could make a chair or a table); and something like structures that could be filled with water to add mass (and drained for moving). There are some major issues with the second one, tho. It's a bit of a hard problem b/c ppl like the sturdyness of furniture (for the most part).

#19596

> A less permanent stake-like option that would also be suitable indoors would be something like weightlifting dumbells attached to the leg bottoms.

Yeah, I was thinking that pairing something like that with a tensegrity table/etc might be a good option. You could make weights cheaply and have standard mounts the weights screw in to (or connect however). Ppl could adjust their preferred mass that way. And it'd be cheap to produce plastic ones to fill in the gaps. Similar to how some mice have weights you can add/remove.

There's one other issue I can think of WRT tensegrity furniture (atm at least): deconstruction for transport. They don't look like the easiest structures to (un)assemble. Mb with enough slack on the ropes that sort of solves itself, though?

I sometimes think about InternetRules or GISTE (others, too) when they haven't posted for a while. I hope everything is good and they come back.

(I haven't been checking FIGG regularly, so might have missed something there, but i think it's been quiet for a while. mb discord, too, bc there are some channels I don't read in full)

this isn't about FI specifically, but I talk a bit about us in the first half.

praise is a weird thing in FI. I agree with curi that people ~withhold it here when they wouldn't otherwise. There are good and bad things about that, in large part because there's good and bad praise. Praise is somewhat related (at least commonly) with something like endorsement; mb something a little gentler than endorsement. If you're because cautious, it's easy to think that -- bc of that relation -- praise can be like a bit dangerous, like if you praised something that had mistakes. IDK the solution, but I think that's accurate so far.

Appreciation is sort of like a superset of praise (tho mb there are some things that are praiseworthy but not good to appreciate). I appreciate a lot about FI and discussions here, but not every part of those discussions is *praiseworthy* even tho it is *appreciated*. I think -- if you wanted to take action to make FI a ~friendlier place -- appreciation is a safer/easier way to do it than praise (tho that shouldn't mean we like exclude praise or whatever).

Benedictions are a thing I only learnt about recently. The word refers to like the nice stuff a priest will say at the end of a church service. 'may you be blessed in all you do' or something. more generally I think it's a good description for lots of the stuff we say, esp to lots of ppl at once, like 'hope you all have a good break' between classes.

In general, I think of benedictions as like less than praise and appreciation, but also more general b/c of that. *Benedictions have reach.*

*What is praiseworthy? What is appreciation-worthy?* These are questions that are related to morality. Good answers to those questions have a lot of morality baked in, but different moral knowledge is baked in to each. I think the same applies to benedictions.

I think benedictions are so general that good answers to questions like 'What benedictions are worth making?' will have some very deep and fundamental moral truths baked in. The benedictions with the most reach are *things you can wish people that apply to all people and all situations, all the time*. Put in that context it almost seems obvious that deep/far-reaching moral knowledge needs to be baked in.

So good benedictions are ~special in a way that other well-wishings aren't. It seems significant.

---

On new years (very shortly after learning about benedictions) I had an idea for a video that was basically me saying benedictions the whole time, interspersed with some of the philosophy/ideas above (IDK what I would have done with editing/b-roll or whatever). The title would have been something like 'benedictions for 2021; a video for everyone' I wrote 3000 words of benedictions as a sort of draft-script while I was playing with the idea. There are some longer paragraphs that were making more of a point than just the benediction (about like society or democracy or living a good life), but there are like 100+ things on the list. Stuff like: (paraphrasing from memory) 'i hope you learn new things' and 'i hope you figure out the places that you get stuck and ways to avoid getting stuck on those things'. there was also stuff like 'if you die, i hope you get to do so on your own terms' and 'i hope you don't get sick'. there was more stuff like access to running water, living in a democracy, don't accidentally contribute to the destruction of your society, learn humility, able to reliably take care of your family (like for parents). If anyone is interested I think I'm okay posting it.

#19617

Maybe I don't understand tensegrity precisely. I was thinking a tensegrity structure is one that bears weight through a combination of compression and tension, rather than rigidity alone.

Regardless, I think the structure in the video could be made to set up and collapse as easy as a camp chair.

It might help to imagine what would happen if the silver "arms" on the inside top and inside bottom of the table in the video had lockable horizontal hinges in the middle and at the table (red disc) attachment points.

So when the hinges are locked, no difference from the video behavior. But when you unlock the hinges, now the arms can fold over on themselves vertically and lie flat against the inside table faces.

When that starts to happen, the tension goes out of the wires, and the table collapses into two discs with the arms and jumbled wires in the middle. If you twist one of the discs while the structure is collapsing it wouldn't even be a jumble - the wires would be approximately straight along the edges.

To reverse the collapsing process you pull the discs apart and re-lock the hinges.

#19637 Telling people they're beautiful, in a pre-recorded video, having never seen them (and probably never will) is also popular.

#19640 The hashtags on that one are notable re target audience:

> Who has been there?🙋🏻‍♂️ #relationshipgoals #ex #exes #singlemom #youarebeautifiul #over30 #over30club #over40 #over40club #divorced #queen

There are also 3500 comments. tiktok seems to be displaying comments as images to prevent copy/paste or something. the first one (for me atm) says it's not always an ex, it can be someone you're currently with too. the second one complained this video didn't fully solve their emotional abuse problem. the third said their husband doesn't show love enough.

this is an exploratory post.

is there merit in comparing work to speedrunning? I'm considering this particularly WRT programming, but I think it applies more generally, too.

I guess the intuitive/typical reaction is that speedrunning=rushing and rushing=>mistakes. That seems like a good prediction of what most ppl would *do* if they tried to speedrun their work. I don't think it's a good criticism of the comparison, tho, b/c it ignores what *the best ppl* would do.

What does *the best ppl* mean? Let's answer that for speedrunning before work.

The best *speedrunners* are able to: *learn a new game quickly* and *practice effectively* so that they *are competitive quickly*. The best speedrunners don't *rush the learning*, but they do *learn effectively*. What's the difference?

The difference between *rushing learning* and *learning effectively* is that *rushing is slower and error prone*; rushing ends up *increasing your error rate* rather than *decreasing it*. A *low error rate is required for effective learning*.

The structural difference between *rushed* and *effective* learning is the same difference between seeking *local optima* and *global optima*. Seeking local optima will sacrifice long term effectiveness for a short term goal, which is what *rushing* does. Seeking global optima sacrifices short term goals (which are ultimately insubstantial, anyway) so that you are effective over the *lifetime* of meeting your goal.

For a speedrunner, the path between *novice* and *expert* can be *long* or *short*. A longer path means that learning was less effective, and a shorter path means it was more effective.

**What is the shortest distance between *novice* and *expert*?** The shortest path is the path of global optima; the path of effective learning.

The difference between *good* and *bad* speedrunners is *the difference in each's shortest path*. A good speedrunner, having practised learning effectively, will be able to approach global optima more quickly than a bad speedrunner, even if the bad speedrunner isn't rushing.

A confronting and difficult reality is that *no individual learning experience is enough for a bad speedrunner to become a good speedrunner*. That is: *effectiveness takes many attempts*, but the *result* in each case is largely outside the control/scope of the relevant event/process.

How does this apply to work?

Being *good* at *speedrunnning work* means that you can power-up effectively in new situations. Being *smart* or *gifted* means you did that once for one thing.

(other things to do now, hopefully that's enough to see where I was going)

I think one of the effects of mainstream scientists' errors in thinking is ~rushing (in the sense I use it in #19773). Scientists end up rushing to try and ~confirm theories. They don't understand the role of conjecture and criticism.

How this works:

1. scientists think that *~checkpoints* exist when papers get published.

2. scientists are selective about projects b/c they want projects that can be published; they don't want to publish self-criticisms/postmortems -- b/c they (and, more importantly, academic elites) see them as failures.

e.g. they don't want to publish a paper about an idea that they came up with, an experiment they did, and a refutation they found. it's like they think that, because they did all 3 of those things, the idea/postmortem/etc isn't worth publishing. if they only did 2 of them (e.g. idea+experiment, or experiment+refutation) then I guess they'd think it was worth publishing. (doing all 3 is just a special case of idea+refutation, which they also don't think worthy of publishing.)

(1) + (2) *seems* to work for making progress b/c other ppl are involved; like the collective work of lots of ppl doing (1) and (2) *happenstantially* results in progress. Some collection of people could do (1)+(2) *indefinitely* without making progress. The reason scientists, particularly, find some success with (1)+(2) is that they have other ideas that contribute to scientific progress.

Scientists often try to find local optima in (1) and/or (2). The result is that they sacrifice global optima. That's bad and slows progress.

I wrote SMB1 Local Optima, the checkpoint-goal method, premature optimization, a conjecture about when optimizations are worth doing, and potenatial risks in *Alisa Discussion*

#19801

For context Nikolas asks -- in the video I responded to -- if anyone knows how to achieve something similar to what I think my method might be able to achieve.

I posted to the YT "members" section for Media Division (the channel), so the comment isn't public AFAIK.

I posted to discord:

> [10:39 AM] Max: I think it's notable how trash the second result is. (And it's from ARI, no less.) It has ?v=l2tYLKzF02Q if you care to watch it. Transcript: https://pastebin.com/1gH534eS

>

Justin replied:

> [11:41 AM] JustinCEO: you should say something about why specifically you think it is trash @Max

> [11:41 AM] JustinCEO: even if other people agree, they might have different reasons/see different issues

Before I get into my reasons, I want to point out the contrast between the 1st and 2nd result in the screenshot.

The first result is "Ayn Rand on Love and Happiness | Blank on Blank". It is a slightly 5-min edited excerpt from Rand's 1959 interview with Mike Wallace and has a stylised animation. The animation seems okay to me. I think the excerpt from Rand's 25-30min interview is well chosen and reasonably complete, tho I last listened to the source about a month ago, so might be mistaken.

I think Ayn Rand's response to Mike Wallace is excellent. I think Mike Wallace was not a particularly good interviewer and was combative. IDK if there's significant context about the 50's that I'm missing, tho.

The second result is "An Objectivist Perspective on Love", an 80sec excerpt from How to Fill Your Life with Meaning (Dave Rubin Interview with Yaron Brook and Gena Gorlin)

. I have not watched the source material, tho scrubbed through to find that the clip is sourced starting around 41min 25sec.

I think the title "An Objectivist Perspective on Love" is dishonest and misleading because it is not an objectivist perspective on love. Gena's answer starts in the wrong place (art?) and does not capture even a tiny fraction of the depth and nuance in "Ayn Rand on Love and Happiness". Gena's answer roughly goes: art is a symbolic embodiment of possibility -> "love is the actual experience of being in such a world and having such people populate your world" -> falling in love with a person is like the "two-sided equivalent" of falling in love with an artwork -> the other person embodies ideas in their person e.g. the ways the laugh and move, the career they pursue, they're the "external concrete embodiment of what makes life worth living for you" and they reciprocate -> the "dual experience" is a "core component of a life ..." (... mumbles, mb 'worth living' or 'long relationship', IDK).

I think Gena doesn't understand Rand's views and misrepresents objectivisim, though there might be missing context that means the excerpt is not representative of Gena's understanding. Some of the stuff she says isn't bad, but some is, and I think it's, at best, a slightly-better-than-mainstream response.

It is possible that ARI's choice of how to frame the clip is doing a disservice to Gena, in which case I put the major blame on their content team, rather than Gena. I am ready to reserve judgement re: Gena if other FI ppl think she's okay.

I think Gena's ideas and response conflict with Rand's ideas in these ways:

* I think it conflicts with Rand's idea that we should love selfishly

* and that it conflicts with Rand's idea that we should love people for their virtues

I think the topic is a very broad and important one wrt morality, and it's a topic that should be dealt with: either in sufficient depth (for most ppl), or concisely with sufficient clarity if one is able to express the ideas with comparable clarity to Rand (if one is able to *do justice* to her ideas). Because ARI is dishonestly promoting a video that claims to offer insight on this topic, but offers none, ARI is making a major philosophical and objectivist error. The way ARI deals with this topic is of both insufficient depth and insufficient clarity.

It's also a dangerous topic (curi's comments re: Cupid flinging arrows comes to mind, ancient Greeks recognised the dangers of mishandling romance). That only exacerbates the issues above, especially because Rand's views are *good* and *moral* and they can *help people*. ARI's video helps no one.

> I think Gena's ideas and response conflict with Rand's ideas in these ways:

> * I think it conflicts with Rand's idea that we should love selfishly

> * and that it conflicts with Rand's idea that we should love people for their virtues

I agree with these two.

Another difference between the two clips is that Gorlin says love is two-directional and Rand doesn’t. I don’t see why love has to be two-directional. You could love someone’s virtues without them loving your virtues. You could love someone for virtues that they have and you don’t have but wish you had.

#19826 your makeup isn't very current. watch some makeup tiktok.

#19826

I like the idea of you doing makeup for a while to see what it's like.

I'm confused by the video in the middle. Why is it there and what does it have to do with the topic?

makeup vlog 2: https://youtu.be/p67Cr0idCUE

playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqNe7EpSQmlGHB81-hzp-DZTFjVFVmWk

still uploading but should be available in 5-15 min.

makeup vlog 3

vlog playlist

I changed my mind on daily videos - I have a list of topics that I can talk a bit about and will do a daily vid as long as I have topics on that list. Today was *cost*.

at ~21:33 in my makeup vlog thing today ( https://youtu.be/Bga0A_1SG0E?t=1279 ) I say (after reading fallibleideas.com/emotions)

> Elliot was better at this stuff 10 or 11 years ago than I am today.

I think there's some bad ideas I have behind that statement. I'm comparing Elliot to me, which I shouldn't do (cargo culting?), and I'm comparing progress/learning/ideas in one specific area with some implication that this is like meaningful. Like it's an important and significant thing that I'm not as good at that.

Also, I compare like elliot-years-ago to max-years (or something) which is a bad way to look at it too. a better way is that I've been doing this for like 6 months and change, and at that stage Elliot had been doing it for ~10 years already. If I put it like that it sounds fine, but the way I put it in the video sounds bad.

In your fourth makeup vlog, you talk about feeling “a bit shit” and you seem unhappy, especially towards the end. You talk about Elliot’s Fallible Ideas essay about emotions. But you don’t relate the two (your negative emotions and the essay). That’s not really in the scope of a vlog about makeup, but maybe it’s something you want to do on your own or write about elsewhere.

I made some self-criticism on the FI discord (and mirrored this in the YT comments):

in my makeup vlog today (#5; https://youtu.be/oSeDWKjSX8c?t=242) I mention that Trump was mistreated b/c he looked a bit orange.

at 4:22 I say:

> ... **and, you know, it's not what I would choose to look like, but at the same time** I think that mean-spiritedness is something is... it's very hard -- and we shouldn't want to do this anyway -- but it's very hard to isolate that to like an individual person.

(emphasis added)

I think I was wrong to say that and actually promoted some of the things I was criticising. I, like, had to mention that I thought it ~distasteful before I said the attacks were wrong. I didn't need to say that I didn't want to look like that; I added it in there for social reasons, and that was wrong.

makeup vlog 6 is live.

@Anon #19827 - what do you think of my recent makeup?

You're the only person who's given me some criticism on the "look" I do in one of these vlogs; I'd appreciate more crits/comments if you're willing. thx.

#19880 my sister gave me some feedback today (only quoting a bit b/c I didn't like specifically ask)

> Wow!! You actually look so great Max!! [...]

That was after I made #19880 but it's relevant so thought I'd mention.

In yesterday's vlog at 4:55ish I talk a bit about how much I spent at Mecca (the makeup store) and my budget.

The first correction is via text in the video (made in the edit) where I give a more precise description of what I told the sales rep about my budget.

The second correction is in the YT comments:

> The total I spent at Mecca today was $669, so with the cleaning products mentioned at 6:40, plus the brush-cleaning-silicone-utensil ($15), I came in under $600, so I think that Mecca shouldn't be judged poorly for budget stuff; like I'm complicit in spending more than what I initially planned to, so one can't make a judgement about like makeup stores trying to fleece ppl or anything like that. AFAIK they were respectful of my budget (as much as any sales rep can be expected to be). One thing I did not like was that, at the POS, they didn't have a customer-facing screen so I couldn't keep a track of products as they were scanned. I had to wait for them all to be scanned to hear the final price.

> Also, I hope they have some sort of commission system b/c the woman who helped me was really nice and I appreciated her good customer service.

I think it's notable that I felt compelled to do **two** corrections there. I make occasional corrections on minor stuff like this, but I can't remember the last time I needed to make 2 corrections on the same topic.

OP: https://herolfg.com/posts/casualties-in-the-information-war/

The introduction has two sentences:

> People need to understand and agree with the goal of a system.

What's the context here? All systems that ppl use? All systems? Designed systems? etc

In any case; I don't agree. I think ppl and systems can have different goals; what matters is the overlap. Provided that the actors' goals and the system's goals agree *enough* then things can work fine. Some goals are better than others; some goals have *reach*.

Take a traffic/road system. Let's ask some basic questions:

- What's the systems goal?

- What are the goals of the commuters?

- Do commuters need to understand things about traffic systems to use roads effectively?

I don't think ppl need to fully understand and agree with the goal of a traffic system to use it. They just need to understand *enough*: that they can use it to get from A to B. Provided the commuters have a goal like that (getting to work, the shops, home, etc) then it works out. The system might have other goals like: having multiple routes between points, having efficient routes so that it doesn't take too long to travel places, making sure there are enough lanes on the road to accommodate traffic merging and splitting, etc. Ppl don't need to know anything about these other goals to use roads.

> If people ignore the goal of a system, then the system is assuredly being wasteful and counterproductive.

I think this is problematic too, like these are the qs that come to mind:

Assured by what? By the people ignoring the goal of the system? What if the ppl using the system ignore the system's goals but have their own goals? Can the *"misuse"* of a system be efficient or must it always be inefficient?

Similar to above, I think exploring these qs will both provide examples of system use and misuse that isn't counterproductive (it doesn't need to be perfectly optimal) and show that ppl don't need to know/consider the goals of a system to use it. They only need to know enough to know how they can use it to achieve their goals.

---

so far, at the end of the intro, I think I have some major disagreements with HeroLFG and I don't know much about what the blog post is meant to be about; like the title is "Casualties in the Information War" but the intro is about ppl knowing about the goals of a system. I also don't have a sense for the audience or purpose of the post.

because the purpose, audience, and topic of the post is unclear I think it's reasonable for ppl to stop reading b/c the lack of clarity is the first major error in the post.

#19890 https://herolfg.com/posts/casualties-in-the-information-war/

#19909

> Try doing a more modern makeup look?

How do I know if a makeup look is modern or not? I did some research this morning but it's not that much clearer to me. I found some mistakes I was making too, but IDK how they relate to modernity. (like my eyebrows are the wrong shape, which I could have avoided if I'd plucked them differently)

> Are you using being male + wearing makeup as an excuse? The makeup you're doing is unrealistic for a woman to wear in public today.

Excuse for what? Doing an outdated look or doing an unrealistic makeup routine or something else?

IDK what you mean be unrealistic, also. I see women down the street with full coverage + lipstick + eyeshadow. Is there something else that's unrealistic about what I've been doing?

I am planning on doing a lighter makeup routine soon, tho IDK if you would think that's more modern or more realistic.

https://youtu.be/YYaUXrxckJM

#19925 Thank you!

> It would have made more sense to research first before spending a lot of money.

Yes. There are two things that I think are important here:

1. My surprise at how expensive it was is, I think, a worthwhile thing to learn (and something I didn't predict)

2. I'm fortunate enough that $1200 will not have a terrible impact on my life. I was prepared to spend $ to do this, and I chose to prioritise other things (like my time) than doing research on buying makeup efficiently.

Because of these two things, I don't think it was a major error to spend $1200+.

> People can go colour math in drug stores first, and then buy it off amazon later. (At least they can in America. I don't know if Australia is different.)

Re Australia being different: sorta. Our drug stores are smaller. I've been to a CVS in SF and a Wallgreens in Vegas, both were much larger than any Aussie chemist I've ever seen. There are other places I could have gone to color match first, tho (e.g. Myer, which I referenced in like 2 or 3). In chemists they usually just have a printed pallet and some samples, but the samples can be unreliable. I could have sought more assistance from relevant friends or family members too. I definitely didn't do this the best way that I could have.

I also like the idea of paying for a product at the place you do color matching. Mainly this applies to the first instance. It could be an error in my thinking but I think it's also something that's low impact so I haven't thought much about it.

When I went to Mecca, part of the reason I was prepared to spend more $ was that I wanted to do these two weeks decently (not making too many compromises), and I had already decided that I didn't want the project to extend much (or at all) beyond two weeks.

> Also I don't know why you are so negative about drugstores.

If you're referring specifically to the comment/self-crit I made; I don't know either, that's part of the reason for the self-crit. If you mean a point in the video (other than me saying "drug store" in a funny voice) I would appreciate you linking me. I want to understand, too.

>> I think my change of voice implies something negative, either: about the idea of calling it a "drug store"; or about ppl who shop at a drug store for makeup e.g. poor ppl, whores (referenced in vlog 5), lazy/careless ppl, etc; or mb just like an anti-american attitude in general (I hope not this one).

>

> The one you hope it's not is the anti-American one. Do you think the other ones are all fine?

No. I think the anti-American attitude would be worse, tho, because it would point to a more substantial error in my thinking. I think the other errors would be easier to fix. I might be wrong, but based on my estimate of how big a problem it is, I think the anti-American attitude is a bigger issue.

> Why do you assume people who buy drugstore makeup are poor or lazy/careless?

I don't; the list I provided was meant to be brainstorming (so like an "or", not an "and"). They're attitudes that I guessed I could have, rather than things I think I believe. I apologize if that came off differently; that wouldn't be good, and I am interested in avoiding that sort of error in the future.

> Do you think not wanting to spend $1200 on makeup makes someone "poor"?

Not at all. I know I'm doing things from scratch (so spending a lot at once) and I know I haven't tried to spend money efficiently. WRT buying from a drug store, AFAIK that's the cheapest place to buy makeup, so *if* I have something against ppl who buy makeup at a drug store, then it might be that I actually have something against poor ppl. Without knowing what that attitude is, I can't fix it.

I think it's notable you didn't quote the last part of my self-criticising comment:

>> Anyway, I think changing my voice like that was bad and reflects something (which I don't fully understand atm) that is not a good thing. Like some bad or wrongly-judgmental attitude.

>> Ideas and crits (i.e. help) welcome

I specifically ask for help on this issue. I don't know if you're intending to be helpful or not, but I want to mention that at this point. You have helped me reflect from some PoVs I hadn't done so from previously, tho. Thx.

> Also, why use the word "whores" at all? That's not a neutral word.

The use of "whores" is a reference to the clip from *The Simpsons* I played in 5. I agree it's not neutral. In hindsight I don't think I provided enough context to justify using it; like if someone was reading that comment without watching ep 5 then it will seem like an error, whereas I might have been able to make the comment -- just as effectually -- without using the word.

#19927

> Even if it made sense to spend $1200 and to prioritize saving your time, it could still be an error to have spent $1200 *in the way you did*. I'm not saying it was - just that this is a possibility to consider. For example, maybe you should have spent some portion of the $1200 on hiring someone for a consultation.

Ahh, yeah. gp. I think I have some bad ideas still about things like money and paying ppl. paying for a bit of consultation didn't occur to me; maybe because I though I could have asked some women I know and gotten some advice for free? Hmm.

** --- (the rest of this post is some free-writing / reflection / notes) --- **

This is mb also related to an attitude I have towards learning, where I like think it's better or more valuable to explore things on my own than bootstrap via other ppl's knowledge. Something like that. This is a bit funny, tho, b/c I am still bootstrapping via other ppl's knowledge (tutorial vids), just not as ~directly as Q&A that I could do via like an hour of consulting time.

There's some merit to that learning attitude generally. like DD made some significant improvements WRT structural knowledge & Popper's ideas. he thought about them in a diff way that had more reach (or something like that); they were more useful b/c of the way that he understood them, and that understanding was possible b/c he didn't do too much like direct bootstrapping from contemporary Popperians.

Mb that learning attitude makes some sense to do for a bit, or if you're a really good thinker and working on hard/complex philosophy, but I think I've just convinced myself that it's not worth doing most of the time (e.g. learning makeup).

** makeup content / cost / social dynamics **

Also, I mentioned vlog 9 at 4:27 that there's like a lack of critical content about makeup; I think if there was more critical content about makeup then that would have helped me spend $ more efficiently.

This relates to some social dynamics in makeup vids too, like the section from Stephanie Bailey that I quote/show in vlog 8 at 6:28 where she claims that most ppl can't afford to wear expensive foundation every day. Those sort of attitudes can suppress good tips like: if you are willing to spend $1000 then buy expensive staple products up front. Also, expensive foundation works out to like $1/day which isn't like totally negligible, but it's pretty affordable if someone wanted it. *Most* of the $ i spent at Mecca was on other stuff where cheaper alternatives aren't as impactful.

#19926

> I specifically ask for help on this issue. I don't know if you're intending to be helpful or not

yes, I was trying to be helpful. I wouldn't have bothered commenting if I wasn't trying to be helpful.

Your response was long and detailed but failed to actually engage with most of my points, so it was difficult to respond back to. You also seemed defensive, and doubted that I was even trying to help you, despite you opening with "Thank you!"

#19941

> I think the project was successful

what were your initial goals? what do you think you succeeded at?

In your first blog, you said stuff about wanting to have a better understanding of women. From what I did watch and read, I didn't think you had a good understanding of my position or experience, or that of other women I know. (Not saying you should continue the project, btw - I don't think you were doing the project in a way that would help you gain an understanding of women either.)

I also don't really think you are interested in discussing it, or interested in the crits that I have. (Not saying you should be - not everything has to be a high priority for you.)

And, again, I am writing this as an attempt to be helpful.

#19944 I want to think about what I should say before I reply fully. I agree that I was defensive. I think some of my greatfulness was genuine, even tho I was a bit defensive. There's a conflict/tension there tho I'm not fully sure of the detiails yet.

DD says in BoI something like: some subset of objectively true ideas implies all other objectively true ideas. This make sense; if there's some ~objectively true and complete body of knowledge to describe reality (infinite or not), and progress is moving us towards that body of knowledge, then things that are ~true (in the everyday CF sense: they work) will overlap more and more, like they will imply parts of each other and they can be ~easily integrated.

one way that i thought about this after reading BoI was the idea of a "stand alone complex" (the subtitle of s1 of the anime *ghost in the shell*). The way i imagined things in my mind was like a graph of ideas/explanations that connected to each other. those idea-nodes only connect if they don't contradict. there are like 'bubbles' of ideas that are compatible with one another; all the bounded ones are parochial, but the single unbounded one (finite atm but forever growing and unbounded) is like the 'biggest self-supporting collection of ideas'; the "stand alone complex" (SAC).

integration is like creating stronger interconnections between the idea-nodes in that graph, and reducing the number of nodes via ~unification (not that this lessens the ~magnitude/measure of the SAC of ideas).

Goldratt has a lot of good ideas in his books, and concepts like 'excess capacity and how it relates to constraints' helps us understand the core of falliblism: that we can still 'know' things even if there are problems and ultimately all ideas will be refuted by ever-better ideas. it helps us answer why it's okay to use newtonian gravity in a toy simulation.

This sort of thing has already been integrated and expanded upon by IGCs, breakpoints, yes/no, and curi's other work.

I wrote this in part because I am continually surprised by the convergence between ideas as I learn more about CF and it's antecendents. I love it; it's great.

Max, do you think you achieved *mastery* of some significant, new things in your makeup project? If so, you could list those. If not, I think you should have higher standards and stop overreaching.

Can you self-evaluate the correctness of any of your new makeup knowledge with similar confidence to your self-evaluations of counting to three or judging whether the word "with" is spelled correctly? Those are examples of what mastery looks like.

The same goes for all your other philosophical work. Keep it simpler. Practice things. Aim for mastery. Aim for a low error rate where correct criticisms are uncommon, surprising and treasured.

Consider what you do have mastery of and build on it. Plan out projects intentionally with goals and trees, keeping issues like mastery and overreaching in mind.

#19964 You don't have good examples of what success looks for to compare your project to. There's a huge gap from the makeup project to your most similar projects that are clear, confident, decisive, unambiguous successes.

And these are not new things that I'm saying.

Start way smaller, get quick, clear wins, and iterate. Start with multiple successful (micro) projects per day. Finish 100+ in a month with a not-decisive-clear-success rate under 10%. Establish a baseline of what you can do that way and get the iteration started.

I posted #19969 before I meant to. I don't think it's obvious since I was in the final stages of editing. On my KB layout at the time (I have just changed it now) I had tab next to enter on the right thumb pad. this meant that I could accidentally hit <tab> then <enter> when I meant to just hit <enter> or just <tab>. i've avoided this sort of proximity issue in the past (predicting the error and avoiding some key locations b/c of it), but it's something that I should have known to avoid.

this is a project plan that should be achievable in an afternoon/evening (today). my method is based on things i've learnt from curi and method at the end of *it's not luck*

**goal:** produce a fun SMM2 level that teaches and demonstrates the 3 steps of learning: do it right/once, do it consistently, and do it fast.

**ctx:** I own SMM2 and have a little experience with the level editor. I have played 10-20 hrs of SMM2 and am reasonably familiar with the game modes, their features, enemies, interactions, etc. I've done a bit of planning and pre-thought about this, including some exploratory level creation last weekend. I drew up a level concept last night that I think can work -- that was something I wasn't sure about for a while.

**obstacles:**

1- lack of knowledge about vertical levels and camera lock

2- haven't tried to create the level, mb there are inconsistencies with the features I need (e.g. vertical + rising lava in SMW or New SMB modes)

3- haven't uploaded a level before and don't know the process

4- might not have left enough time today

5- it might take me too long to clear the level if it's challenging

6- the level might be too easy so it doesn't effectively teach ppl anything

7- i might not be able to fit enough height in the level to make it interesting and challenging for the player

8- the level is boring or frustrating

9- ppl don't like it

10- i need a level concept+design

11- rising lava might not be fast enough to be challenging (used to demonstrate step 3 in learning process)

12- level isn't challenging

**intermediate goals/objectives:**

- learn about SMM2 level editing via the in-game lessons and supplementary stuff like YT vids; solves obstacles 1,2,3

- work quickly on things that matter (aesthetics last), pay attention to avoid inefficient creation patterns (e.g. use copy-paste); solves obstacle 4 and partially 5

- integrate quality of life features: good checkpoints, avoid lengthy resets, losing progress, softlocks, etc; helps solve obst 5,8

- 3 1-ups + THX, helps solve obst 9

- ensure there's a decent level of challenge, even for experienced players, helps solve 6,8,9

- use doors sparingly and only where necessary. helps solve 7; note: doors could be added at the end to help with quality of life stuff if I'm under the limit of 4 doors.

- **done** come up with a level design/concept to iterate on, solves obst 10.

- use tracks and saws, podoboos, or spinning fire things to create the necessary time pressure, if required, solves obst 11. i can also research more ways to create time pressure and look at what ppl have previously done (e.g. by searching for specific speedrun levels)

- adjust position of blocks to make jumping up harder if it's not hard enough, solves 12 (could also make the gaps in the ledges shorter to make jumping up a bit harder, or add spikes in strategic places to make the jumps a bit more challenging, put higher standards on the players method, and create tension)

I might not need to solve obst 5,7 and I only need partial success with 8,9 (I don't need to please everyone)

most of the intermediate goals are about level design stuff and already include some knowledge i have about level design. I could do exploratory learning if obst 8,9 is an issue at the end.

at this point I chose to re-read *it's not luck ch 26*. I noticed that there's a q Julie asks that I didn't write in my notes during this chapter: "Do you have enough intuition about the subject?" similar to Alex, my answer is "I think so." after reading the chapter I think my next steps in the project are to plan the order I'm going to meet intermediate goals (and the corresponding actions, but that's fairly trivial and can be done ad-hoc), and then to execute on the plan.

**sequence of actions:**

- do the relevant SMM2 tutorials, identify gaps in my knowledge or things I'm unsure of, and supplement with more SMM2 tutorials and/or watch relevant YT vids

- refine the level design with my new knowledge and decide things like possible game modes and the required maps (I think particular backgrounds/level-themes are required to do vertical levels the way I want to). ideally I should have several options for game mode and level theme combinations that can let me achieve the goal.

- create a prototype level without quality of life features to verify the design can work

- iterate on design if necessary, do additional research if necessary (in general I can do this after any step)

- refine the prototype level and include the quality of life features

- test the level start-to-finish and evaluate it against the goal. iterate as described if need be.

- refine and polish the level, test again, add aesthetic stuff if I have time.

- publish the level.

there are some trivial steps I haven't included like 'name the level', 'write the level description', 'turn on my switch', etc. don't think it's necessary to document those, tho. I can do all that with excess capacity and they can be done at any point (except like turning on the switch, etc).

**level design prelim**

the main tech the level teaches is to reliably climb up a cliff via 1-block wide ledges

note: the 2nd image is of the sub-world and the note on the bottom right that's a bit cut off says "enuf time for player to use pipe to reset".

**meta-goal of the project**

my meta-goal for this project is, having now planned it, to not need to alter the plan but still complete the project. if I fail this goal, then my goal will fall back to altering the plan, documenting what went wrong/what I missed, and continuing with the plan. (I might have to alter it more than once.) another way to put this goal is that this project and plan has a low error rate.

doing this plan took approx 1hr

I recorded a video of the SMM2 level for anyone who is curious but doesn't have SMM2: https://s3.wasabisys.com/xert/2021-02-13_22-44-18.mp4

I recorded it with a capture card but didn't use HDMI throughput so there was a bit of input latency; it's not as difficult/inconsistent as it looks in the vid.

> #19927

> ** --- (the rest of this post is some free-writing / reflection / notes) --- **

> This is mb also related to an attitude I have towards learning, where I like think it's better or more valuable to explore things on my own than bootstrap via other ppl's knowledge. Something like that. This is a bit funny, tho, b/c I am still bootstrapping via other ppl's knowledge (tutorial vids), just not as ~directly as Q&A that I could do via like an hour of consulting time.

> There's some merit to that learning attitude generally. like DD made some significant improvements WRT structural knowledge & Popper's ideas. he thought about them in a diff way that had more reach (or something like that); they were more useful b/c of the way that he understood them, and that understanding was possible b/c he didn't do too much like direct bootstrapping from contemporary Popperians.

> Mb that learning attitude makes some sense to do for a bit, or if you're a really good thinker and working on hard/complex philosophy, but I think I've just convinced myself that it's not worth doing most of the time (e.g. learning makeup).

I think you have some really big mistakes in your thinking here. They are the kinds of mistakes that could be affecting all the other learning you are doing too, so it's worth actually thinking about and figuring it out. It's not specific to the context of makeup (which is where it came up).

I know you identify that you may have a mistake in your thinking. But I think the mistakes are worse/bigger than you realize.

I just wanted to note this because I have seen other mistakes in your writing & learning processes that I think may be caused by this same line of thinking.

> #19985

> I think your msg is saying that, even if I have posted about this problem and mb recognise it a bit, that it's a bigger problem than I realise and has bigger impacts than I realise, even still. Also that if I want to get better at learning and thinking then I have to address this mistake as somewhat of a priority because it's a major error.

> Does this line up with what you meant?

Yes, that is what I meant. I know you recognize it as a problem. But I don't think that your view goes far enough. You still think there is merit in doing things from scratch, not building off of other people's knowledge.

I think you noticed a mistake in your thinking, but your analysis seems kind of like you think you are taking a thing that is good in a general way, and applying it in an area where it isn't good.

You aren't taking the mistake seriously enough - you are downplaying it, when you should be emphasizing it.

I think this mistake has come up in other places. You said something in discord the other day:

> I ~never look at solns for coding or maths stuff.

I think that view is mistaken, and is related to the mistake I am talking about in this post. You value starting from scratch, figuring things out on your own, not building off of existing knowledge. I don't think that is the best way to learn.

#19987

>> I ~never look at solns for coding or maths stuff.

> I think that view is mistaken, and is related to the mistake I am talking about in this post. You value starting from scratch, figuring things out on your own, not building off of existing knowledge. I don't think that is the best way to learn.

I think I just realised something.

I've changed my attitude a bit since mid-feb (in the right direction but not really going past any major breakpoints).

I was thinking about project planning, and I noticed that I don't do stuff like explicitly make trees for everything (I do for some things and particularly for hard things).

Mostly I do that in my head, and incompletely -- if I wrote the tree down and did proper brainstorming I'd have a better tree. For lots of stuff it doesn't matter *at the time*. Like I have enough *excess capacity* in my automatic-tree-making that it usually doesn't cause a project to fail. Partly that's b/c I can update it easily and usually there's nothing high stakes enough that missing it is really bad. However, have I *mastered* tree-making? Well, I just said that I haven't: "if I wrote the tree down and did proper brainstorming I'd have a better tree".

Why does this attitude seem okay at the time, but actually isn't? B/c, in effect, I am and have been compromising my self-judgement (when I move on too quickly and also don't keep improving those skills). I end up thinking I have more excess capacity (WRT e.g. planning skills) than I do, but how will I know that before I start a project? Certainly I do have *some* idea of whether I can complete a project, but I still make mistakes, and I'd have a much better estimate if I mastered relevant skills.

It's not that I'm immediately overreaching or doing it consistently, but I *am* consistently *at risk* of overreaching (to diff degrees in diff contexts).

I guess this isn't actually a direct reply to *trying to be helpful*, but I think it's related. I've thought a lot about sources of organization of knowledge recently, and there have been some ~minor changes in my choices b/c of it. One of the reasons this idea is related is that I think it implies that, b/c master is so important, the benefit of using well organized info is increased.

It's common that people can do stuff with their autopilots/intuitions/defaults without writing much down. Some people are even really good at some stuff (their expertise) that way. But it's limiting. It puts a cap on how advanced your knowledge can get. (It's not an exact cap. It's more like it creates diminishing returns on your learning, so going further takes more and more work.) Explicit analysis and error correction of the pretty-good stuff removes the cap on progress. It makes it easier to realize better can exist (people generally don't see what they're missing out on) and access it.

An addendum:

> most ppl can get twice as better at most things in less than 2 years.

That's provided they have the philosophical knowledge about learning to do so. That's the major constraint for most ppl. But I don't think those ideas are necessarily that hard to learn. I should have made this bit more clear, tho.

One reason I didn't say it as explicitly in the prev post is that I think this stuff is included in "the organizational quality of the learning material", like good learning material will also have good knowledge about learning that it teaches you beforehand or along the way.

That's a bit contradictory to what I say at the end tho: "One of the benefits of doing philosophy ...". The contradiction is b/c I say this helpful skill is helpful as an afterthought, but don't mention it when it's more important -- earlier in the text. It's a contradiction because that sort of bad oraganization is probs not good to have in a mini-essay about the importance of quality organization.

#20312 i replied at http://curi.us/2417-learning-skills-is-non-linear

#18750 Max, you should not be trying to write a philosophy book or a long series of articles. That's large overreaching. You should practice the things from our tutoring.