flâneur

Anonymous Bat

3 followers · 2 following · 442 views

on the atlas — 70

highlights — 31

  • Because you have your own sense of what a good solution might look like, you can say “no, I think it could be simpler here”, or “but don’t we already do X?”, or “can we express this problem in these familiar terms?“.
    LLMs reward expertise
  • However, you can’t prompt like Tao on mathematical questions just by following these tips. The key to his technique is actually understanding the mathematics: pulling the relevant idea out of ChatGPT’s multi-paragraph response, suggesting alternate approaches or formulations, and identifying what “looks weird”.
    LLMs reward expertise
  • This makes the importance of conversation noticeable to me. Whenever we drop below a certain level of talking, friction accumulates. We get more stuck in our ways, we get stressed and don’t have time to maintain the shared context necessary to understand each other.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • We talked three or four hours a day, maybe more. We’d talk in bed in the morning about the school Tolstoy ran at Yasnaya Polyana; we’d talk about machine learning while walking the path in the woods where my grandfather had installed benches for birdwatching; we talked about talking.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • I kept a notebook where I jotted down things I wanted to google and twice a week I’d go down to the local library, look at the list, and say, why on earth did I want to know Justin Bieber’s net worth? And then I’d go home again, to read and write, listen and talk.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • When you write classical poetry, you impose strict rules on yourself to deliberately make it harder to say what you want—and this is what makes poetry come alive. W.H. Auden, the British poet, praised metrical rules because they “forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self.”
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • And so, when M is put in a situation where he has to make sacrifices for his friends and family, he easily chooses them because he views them as opportunities; he knows that those kairos moments create deeper connections than any others.
    People Who Are Naturally ___. - by Jane Zhang
  • Eventually, you ought to be able to ask “AI, should I marry this person?” And again, it won’t answer yes or no, but it will look through whatever texts and emails you give it access to, learn what it can about your relationship, and answer something like “If you marry this person, I think there’s an 85% chance you get divorced within five years”, or something like that. This is the least offensive and most useful form of “AI has real opinions on your life” that I’m able to envision.
    The AI Superforecasters Are Here - by Scott Alexander
  • But I think prediction markets themselves will remain an important piece of epistemic infrastructure.
    The AI Superforecasters Are Here - by Scott Alexander
  • You are throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
    Make It Work, Then Prove It Works: A Framework for Research - Vincent Sitzmann
  • Sometimes we’d find something, and I’d gently encourage them to think more about why they spend so little time doing the few things they seemed to really care about. But often we’d come up empty-handed. Their classes were merely tolerable, their activities were meaningless diversions or resume-stuffers. They did what they did all day because their parents told them to, or everyone else was doing it, or because it seemed like it might get them a job, not because they actually liked it. These were students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard. Their reward was––surprise!–…
    Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
  • I was a resident advisor for most of undergrad and graduate school, so I spent a lot of time talking to young adults who were freaking out about what to do with their lives.
    Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
  • The only time your unconscious bugs your conscious is when it has a problem that needs attention: we’re tired, we’re confused, we don’t like doing whatever we’re doing right now. The rest of the time, it just invisibly solves things for you. That relationship can make it seem like your unconscious is stupid and lazy while your conscious is wise and diligent, but that’s because you never pay attention to your unconscious when it’s doing its job.
    Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
  • Thinks long and comes up with stuff.
    Typst: About us
  • Full Stack & Operations Sits down and gets things done.
    Typst: About us
  • Leonardo D. Vinci never heard of Ali Abdaal in his life. Nor did Claude D. Bussy, nor René D. Cartes.
    If You're a Productive Person, Here's Why You Should K*ll Yourself
  • Leonardo D. Vinci never heard of Ali Abdaal in his life. Nor did Claude D. Bussy, nor René D. Cartes.
    If You're a Productive Person, Here's Why You Should K*ll Yourself
  • In my attempts, I combined wall staring with a few other concepts I had heard about. First was activating the parasympathetic nervous system by staring at the wall “out-of-focus” and using peripheral vision. Second was incorporating mind blanking which means trying to think of nothing. I tried intervals of 5-10 minutes and when I was done, my focus was back!
    Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity | Alex Selimov
  • The core problem is that most people by default are in an information overload. A paper published in 2012 showed that in 2008 the average person was receiving 34 GB of information daily, with a daily information exposure growth rate of about 5.4% per year 1. Extrapolating that trend, we would be at about 87 GB worth of data today.
    Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity | Alex Selimov
  • We’re super bad at this. We’re frightened people. We don’t like icky things and making a bold, real-life step is icky. If there’s any ounce of procrastination susceptibility in us, here’s where it’ll show itself.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • Steve Jobs compared life to connecting the dots, pointing out that while it’s easy to look at your past and see how the dots connected to lead you to where you are, it’s basically impossible in life to connect the dots forwards.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • When you think of your career as a tunnel, it causes an identity crisis in anyone who doesn’t feel sure of who exactly they are and who they’ll want to be decades from now—which is most sane people. It enhances the delusion that what we do for work is a synonym for who we are, making a question mark on your map seem like an existential disaster. When you think of your career as a tunnel, the stakes to make the right choice seem so high that it explodes the feeling of tyranny of choice. For perfectionist types especially, this can be utterly paralyzing.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • Do you treat the words of your external influences as information, held and considered by an authentic inner you, that you’ve carefully decided to embrace? Or are your influences themselves actually in your brain, masquerading as inner you?
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • Like if there’s a certain career path that sounds fantastic to you, unpack that. Which tentacles in particular are yearning for that career—and which specific parts of those tentacles? If you’re not currently working towards that career you supposedly yearn for, try to figure out why not. If you think it’s because you’re afraid of failing, unpack that. Fear of failure can emerge from any of the tentacles, so that’s not a specific enough analysis. You want to find the specific source of the fear. Is it a social tentacle fear of embarrassment, or of being judged by others as not that smart, or o…
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • Unless you’re one of those people who’s really practiced at analyzing your subconscious, it might be dark in the basement
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • When we think about our career goals and fears and hopes and dreams, our consciousness is just accessing the net output of the Yearning Octopus—which is usually made up of its loudest voices.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • And if that weren’t enough, you sometimes have furious internal conflict inside a single yearning. Like when your desire to pursue your passion can’t figure out what it’s most passionate about.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • your personal tentacle has everyone sweating their dick off working at two comedy-writing internships simultaneously that somehow manage to bring in less money combined than you made dressing up as an Egyptian enchantress to wait tables at Jekyll & Hyde sophomore year of college.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • The first thing to think about is that there are totally distinct yearning worlds—each living on one tentacle. These tentacles often do not get along with each other.
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • The Okay But Why Do You Think You Can Help Me With My Career Reflection You Draw Stick Figures for a Living Blue Box
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why
  • These are people who feel indecisive about their career path. They’ve been told to follow their passion, but they don’t feel especially passionate about anything
    How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why