This is part 30 of 30 in the Hammertime Sequence. Click here for the intro.

One of the overarching themes from CFAR, related to The Strategic Level, is that what you learn at CFAR is not a specific technique or set of techniques, but the cognitive strategy that produced those techniques. It follows that if I learned the right lessons from CFAR, then I would be able to produce qualitatively similar – if not as well empirically tested – new principles and approaches to instrumental rationality.

After CFAR, I wanted to design a test to see if I had learned the right lessons. Hammertime was that sort of test for me. Now here’s that same test for you.

The Final Exam

I will give three essay prompts and three difficulty levels. Original ideas...

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igshipilov2d20

3. Blind spots, cognitive errors

Thinking that "caring" is thinking for another person

This is when I constantly remind Sveta to grab a robe or do some household chores. The problem is that Sveta already remembers to do them, and my reminders only annoy her, not help her.

It's like imperative programming, where you describe how to do each step (vs. declarative programming, where you describe what to do).
It's also like spoon-feeding a baby with its own hand.
It's also like hyper-parenting when you take your kid to the hospital even when he's a teenager, or when... (read more)

2igshipilov2d

2. Principles Act as if you are building a solid long-term relationship, even if it is likely you will never see that person again. * Turn in work on time * Always give notice as soon as you realize you are going to miss a deadline (show up for a meeting on time, turn in work on time). Separate the person's behavior from the meaning of your conversation. As a friend of mine said when her five year old son used tears to force her to go out with him in the evening after a long hard day, she said: "If I didn't want to, I wouldn't go. I would have explained to him that I was very tired and that's why I didn't want to go out. He would probably have been hysterical, but that's just him expressing his emotions. The main thing is that I explained the reason and he heard me. He understands the reason for saying no: not the authoritarian "because I said NO", but the comprehensible, coherent and logical explanation: 'because I'm tired'". My conclusion is this: it doesn't matter how a person behaves. Separate his emotions from the meanings you communicate to each other. I have a problem with this, by the way: even in a conversation with an adult, I emphasize emotions. That is, the person may be rude but sending signals about what they need to agree with me, and I'm so triggered by the emotions they're broadcasting that I don't notice their signals - and because of that, I continue a conversation about something I should have left long ago and moved on to the next step. Empathize This means - understand the person. Don't "agree" but just hear him in the way he is trying to explain to you. At times like this, respond with, "I think I get it. What you're saying is that it's important to you that..., and to accomplish that, you're suggesting... because you see that as the only (or best) way to solve the problem?" After the interviewee answers, you can ask, "Then can you flesh out what other options you see?" Be polite first There are people who have been t

2igshipilov2d

Hammertime is an old, but still really helpful "challenge", if I may so. I have learned some brand new fundamentally useful habits from this 30-days period, and this way – a huge warm Thank You, alkjash! I will answer this final exam in several messages, separating them but three themes you provided. ---------------------------------------- 1. Techniques Trust the exocortex / exobrain (reminders, todo-list) with everything you need to "remember" on a long run. Kinda: * Getting the dish out of the oven on time. * Show up on time for your dentist appointment. * Get some physical exercise done.

Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?

189

Eliezer Yudkowsky

(Cross-posted from Facebook.)

Now and then people have asked me if I think that other people should also avoid high school or college if they want to develop new ideas. This always felt to me like a wrong way to look at the question, but I didn't know a right one.

Recently I thought of a scary new viewpoint on that subject.

This started with a conversation with Arthur where he mentioned an idea by Yoshua Bengio about the software for general intelligence having been developed memetically. I remarked that I didn't think duplicating this culturally transmitted software would be a significant part of the problem for AGI development. (Roughly: low-fidelity software tends to be algorithmically shallow. Further discussion moved to comment below.)

But this conversation did get me thinking about...

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2ErioirE2d

When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases? If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.

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I find that subjective measurements are punished harder than objective ones. You are sometimes forgiven for claiming that "science shows X", but personal opinions are rarely allowed to discriminate, even if they, by their very nature, and meant to do exactly that. Example: "I want to date X type of people" or "I wouldn't date X type of people". For almost every category of X, you'll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn't consciously choose any of them. I don't think it's just about shouting the loudest or most convincingly. At least I want to stress that what counts as "convincing" is more emotional than rational, in all cases where the rational is less pleasant to the ear. Some people can see through this and side with the truth, but I think the ratio of them is too small to counter the effect. Since this is mostly about value, objectivity can't help us. Even if it could (through agreement about metrics), the relationships of real-world data is too complex. War feels terrible, yet it's great for technological advancements. "War is good" is not a common opinion at all, it lost, and the positive effects are rarely even considered. Society tends to think of things as either entirely good or entirely bad, but if you consider 3 or 4 links of cause and effect, such thinking becomes useless. But society generally doesn't look that far, and neither does it like people who do. People who look that far ahead will advocate for terrible things now to bring about good things later (accelerationism, revolution, eugenics, etc). But it will happily make the locally best choice even when it's completely unsustainable. Anyway - I think making the correct choice requires some willpower, for the same reason that it requires willpower to eat salad rather than a burger. But the average person, to the extent that they're "moral", tends to be weak. No willpower, no backbone, no abiliy to resist temptation, conflict-shy, afraid to assert themselves. Stronger people suff

2ErioirE2d

You're right, "objectively" doesn't fit as well in that statement as I thought. That is how I intended 'convincing' to be interpreted. It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. "I don't want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]" sounds a lot less politically correct than "I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction." because you don't have to explain your criteria to everyone. I admit that's more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.

StartAtTheEnd2d10

I see! I think we largely agree then.

It does depend how you explain yourself, but in the end, you're just wording the same thing (the same preference) differently, and that's still assuming that you know the reason of your own preference, and that they have a reason.

The logic seems to be "when the truth looks bad, it is, therefore you must pretend otherwise", which adds a useless layer on top of everything obscuring the truth. The truth isn't always more valuable than pleasant lies, but when this constructed social reality starts influencing areas in which... (read more)

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Nominated Posts for the 2018 Review

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The Final Exam

3. Blind spots, cognitive errors

Thinking that "caring" is thinking for another person