flâneur

Klaudia U.

8 followers · 10 following · 453 views

on the atlas — 123

highlights — 387

  • Minor Barriers Aren’t Minor
    Some Advice Gathered from People Smarter than Me
  • Remember What Used to Work, Then Do It Again
    Some Advice Gathered from People Smarter than Me
  • so be good to your graph
    how I think when I think about programming - alice maz
  • It's simple, just pick a topic, and then make yourself think about the topic. Don't think vaguely about the topic. Don't focus on recalling facts. The goal is to generate an idea. No setup is required. You don't need to go to a whiteboard or open your laptop. Just start thinking.
    Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform — LessWrong
  • As part of a project studying the evolution of (simulated) organisms, computer scientist Charles Ofria wanted to limit the replication rate of a digital organism. So, he programmed the system to pause after each mutation, measure the mutant’s replication rate in an isolated test environment, and delete the mutant if it replicated faster than its parent. However, the organisms evolved to recognize when they were in the test environment and “play dead” (pause replication) so they would not be eliminated and instead be kept in the population where they could continue to replicate outside the test…
    Treacherous turns in the wild
  • reported feeling like their solution arrived "all at once" and were "more like insights" as opposed to deliberate/analytical.
    Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform — LessWrong
  • Alcohol concentration (sorta the opposite of stims of you squint)
    Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform — LessWrong
  • I only take them on days I know I plan to be productive, and have hope that they enable me to be productive. If I ever take them on a day I fail to motivate myself, it weakens the semiotic/narrative signal for my brain to switch into a mode where it expects productivity & silences competing motivations. Plus, if I know I mostly won't be productive for a while (e.g. vacation or something), I go off them to reset desensitisation (usually resets a long way within a week it seems).
    Johannes C. Mayer's Shortform — LessWrong
  • despite their structure, convolutional neural nets can fit random noise
    Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization
  • Why is depression an episodic disease? That is, how come so many people get depressed for no reason, stay depressed for a few months to a few years, and then get better – only to relapse back into depression a few years later? If people get depressed because of some life stressor like a divorce, how come they don’t get un-depressed once the life stressor goes away? Is depression some kind of attractor state? If so, why?
    What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis | Slate Star Codex
  • Is there some huge problem with having too much synapse formation which the brain is desperately trying to avoid?
    What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis | Slate Star Codex
  • Everyone used to think that traditional antidepressants like SSRIs worked by increasing serotonin (and so by extension depression must have something to do with low serotonin levels). But SSRIs increase serotonin very quickly (within hours) yet take months to work. Something longer-term must happen when serotonin levels have been increased for long enough. That something has now been pretty conclusively identified as an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)
    What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis | Slate Star Codex
  • rats who are subjected to chronic stress develop atrophy of dendrites in their prefrontal cortex.
    What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis | Slate Star Codex
  • Electroconvulsive therapy (“shock therapy”) is very effective at treating depression if it induces a seizure in the patient, so the increased activity from seizures must be helpful somehow.
    What Is Depression, Anyway?: The Synapse Hypothesis | Slate Star Codex
  • (in fact, I think the paper might be claiming that “attention” just means a localized narrowing of confidence intervals in a certain direction; for example, if I pay attention to the feeling of my shirt on my skin, then I can feel every little fold and micromovement. This seems like an important point with a lot of implications.)
    It’s Bayes All The Way Up | Slate Star Codex
  • If dopamine represents a confidence interval, then increased dopaminergic signaling should mean narrowed confidence intervals and increased certainty
    It’s Bayes All The Way Up | Slate Star Codex
  • Consider increased AMPA signaling combined with decreased NMDA signaling. Bottom-up processing would become more powerful, unrestrained by top-down models. The world would seem to become “noisier”, as sensory inputs took on a life of their own and failed to snap into existing categories. In extreme cases, the “handshake” between exuberant bottom-up processes and overly timid top-down processes would fail completely, which would take the form of the sudden assignment of salience to a random stimulus.
    It’s Bayes All The Way Up | Slate Star Codex
  • In their model, bottom-up sensory processing involves glutamate via the AMPA receptor, and top-down sensory processing involves glutamate via the NMDA receptor. Dopamine codes for prediction error, and seem to represent the level of certainty or the “confidence interval” of a given prediction or perception.
    It’s Bayes All The Way Up | Slate Star Codex
  • So – did you know that the neurotransmitters in the brain might represent different terms in Bayes’ Theorem?
    It’s Bayes All The Way Up | Slate Star Codex
  • Braben, in that last part, emphasizes the importance of freedom to allow scientists to follow their own research taste. Vannevar Bush: “scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” Creativity is the essence of the human spirit, and flowers best when it’s unconstrained.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • I have very explicitly avoided trying to define my taste of pottery in terms of specific styles or potters.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint” If you’re going to be a gardener, it helps to like the smell of roses. If you’re going to be a writer, it helps to appreciate sentences.
    Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile
  • Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • We are tempted to think that our identity resides inside us: that we are the little homunculi operating the controls behind our foreheads. But, clearly, this is not true—our identity is distributed in the people around us, our routines and possessions, as much as it is held in a bone cage perched upon the spine.
    My Recent Divorce, and/or Dior Homme Intense
  • As a snacky person, time boxed eating is great for actually letting my body use its glycogen stores. The binary approach to food also means I don’t have to think about food, but can indulge when I do.
    look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu
  • You have to believe that the best place to be, is where you currently are.
    look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu
  • Hilariously, imagining myself as an astronaut was helpful — my responsibility was to learn, do science, and stay healthy until the mission is over.
    look what the cat brought in - by Anson Yu
  • but the people who can make mistakes and laugh about it seem happier to play more guitar.
    Reinforcement Via Giving People Cookies — LessWrong
  • As you slightly change the optimization target, the result of a weak optimization might not change much, but the result of a strong one can change things drastically.
    Optimization Amplifies — LessWrong
  • We have one more degree of freedom to play with: the composition itself. It turns out that this is exactly the degree of freedom which makes it possible to give simple denotational semantics to programs that in imperative languages are traditionally implemented using side effects.
    Kleisli Categories | Bartosz Milewski's Programming Cafe
  • Rent asks us: how do you measure the life of a woman or man? It answers: “in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee; in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.” But you can also measure in floating point operations, in which case the answer is about 10^24.
    Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
  • Our minds are predominately an echo chambers of everything we learn from others, but we must try and add an original thought to the mix every now and then, if we want to improve this world we live in.
    Original Seeing — LessWrong
  • It occurs to me that explaining things to people who "don't get it" is often actually a matter of them not wanting to get it - but being polite enough to feign interest (even to themselves) all the way through the conversation. Most likely, their "wanting to get it" is a "belief in belief" - it's part of their identity and personal integrity that they wish to listen to evidence, but in reality their emotional brain is sending out "what is the point of paying attention to any of this gibberish?" signals, and so they let their mind drift off to other things while they "try" to follow along. They…
    Double Illusion of Transparency — LessWrong
  • You know who else didn’t put the name of the study on his consent forms?
    My IRB Nightmare | Slate Star Codex
  • I once summarized my epistemology like so: “Try to make sure you’d arrive at different beliefs in different worlds.”
    Chapter 7: Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence | Inadequate Equilibria
  • If you can’t remember any time in the last six months when you failed, you aren’t trying to do difficult enough things.
    Chapter 7: Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence | Inadequate Equilibria
  • “Don’t assume you can’t do something when it’s very cheap to try testing your ability to do it,”
    Chapter 7: Status Regulation and Anxious Underconfidence | Inadequate Equilibria
  • something has to go wrong in order for two agents with the same priors to get stuck in a disagreement.1 If you and a trusted peer don’t converge on identical beliefs once you have a full understanding of one another’s positions, at least one of you must be making some kind of mistake.
    Chapter 6: Against Modest Epistemology | Inadequate Equilibria
  • One data point is a hell of a lot better than zero data points.
    Chapter 4: Living in an Inadequate World | Inadequate Equilibria
  • You get all the manganese you need from ordinary drinking water, if it hasn’t been distilled or bottled. Excess amounts may be neurotoxic. One of the leading hypotheses for why multivitamins aren’t found to produce net health improvement, despite having many individual components found to be helpful, is that multivitamins contain 100% of the US RDA of manganese. Similarly, if a multivitamin includes sodium selenite instead of, e.g., se-methyl-selenocysteine, it’s the equivalent of handing you a lump of charcoal and saying, “You’re a carbon-based lifeform; this has carbon in it, right?”
    Chapter 4: Living in an Inadequate World | Inadequate Equilibria
  • To win, choose winnable battles; await the rare anomalous case of, “Oh wait, that could work.”
    Chapter 4: Living in an Inadequate World | Inadequate Equilibria
  • usually, when things suck, it’s because they suck in a way that’s a Nash equilibrium.
    Chapter 2: An Equilibrium of No Free Energy | Inadequate Equilibria
  • One systemic problem can often be overcome by one altruist in the right place. Two systemic problems are another matter entirely.
    Chapter 2: An Equilibrium of No Free Energy | Inadequate Equilibria
  • your main priority should be finding the best mentor possible to help you gain research skills—e.g. via doing research in a professor’s lab, or internships at AI labs
    AGI safety career advice — LessWrong
  • Resist the impulse to round off what the transmitter is saying to something you already understand. A good way to guard against this: attempt to find at least two interpretations, and ask questions which differentiate between them.
    Alignment Research Field Guide — LessWrong
  • "Just read papers" may sound like it's prioritizing your own knowledge, but it often reflects a mindset that’s tacitly assuming that others know exactly what you need to know. "Optimize for your own understanding" is a mindset with a faster feedback loop.
    Alignment Research Field Guide — LessWrong
  • Sure, most stuff is lower-impact than saving the world from destruction. But if you can be enthusiastic about all the other cool ways to make the world better off around you, then I’m much more optimistic that you’ll be able to feel properly motivated to combat existential risk if and when an opportunity to do so arises.
    Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball - LessWrong