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