The Haters Gonna Hate Fallacy
Occasionally I see people doing what I think of as the “Haters Gonna Hate Fallacy”. The HGHF says something like: “People are going to misinterpret you no matter how carefully you word things. Therefore, there’s no point wasting time wording things carefully.” An example: “I think [term X] in your post is going to cause misunderstandings, I’d suggest...
Read MoreGPT-3 space opera
AI Dungeon is an online text adventure which uses the “GPT” AI to generate responses to what you say. You can type in anything, and it will try to create a response. I had tried it a bit before, as well as seeing a friend try, and it had been amusing but very quickly incoherent. Yesterday I tried its upgraded version, the “Dragon Model“. It’s only available in the...
Read MoreHealing vs. exercise analogies for emotional work
I know a fair number of people who put in a lot of effort into things like emotional healing, digging up and dealing with buried trauma, meditative and therapy practices, and so on. (I count myself in this category.) And I think that there’s a thing that sometimes happens when other people see all of this, which is that it all seems kinda fake. I say this because even I have this thought...
Read MoreWaiting
I’ve often noticed in myself a tendency, if I am not doing something immediately engrossing, to find myself waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting, not really being present, just willing time to pass. But the weird thing is, frequently there isn’t anything in particular that I’m waiting *for*. Getting out of that situation, yes, but I don’t have anything in particular that...
Read More18-month follow-up on my self-concept work
About eighteen months ago, I found Steve Andreas’s book Transforming Your Self, and applied its techniques to fixing a number of issues in my self-concepts which had contributed to my depression and anxiety. Six weeks after those changes, I posted a report called “How I found & fixed the root problem behind my depression and anxiety after 20+ years”. I figured that by now it would be...
Read MoreTentatively considering emotional stories (IFS and “getting into Self”)
I’ve recently been getting a lot out of the psychotherapy model of Internal Family Systems, as described in this book. I just wrote a comment on Slate Star Codex describing some of its basics and what I’ve gotten out of it, and thought that I might as well repost it here: I recommend this book, though with the note that I often don’t need to follow the full process outlined...
Read MoreIncorrect hypotheses point to correct observations
1. The Consciousness Researcher and Out-Of-Body Experiences In his book Consciousness and the Brain, cognitive neuroscientist Stansilas Dehaene writes about scientifically investigating people’s reports of their out-of-body experiences: … the Swiss neurologist Olaf Blanke[ did a] beautiful series of experiments on out-of-body experiences. Surgery patients occasionally report leaving...
Read MoreMark Eichenlaub: How to develop scientific intuition
Recently on the CFAR alumni mailing list, someone asked a question about how to develop scientific intuition. In response, Mark Eichenlaub posted an excellent and extensive answer, which was so good that I asked for permission to repost it in public. He graciously gave permission, so I’ve reproduced his message below. (He otherwise retains the rights to this, meaning that the standard CC...
Read MoreOn insecurity as a friend
There’s a common narrative about confidence that says that confidence is good, insecurity is bad. It’s better to develop your confidence than to be insecure. There’s an obvious truth to this. But what that narrative does not acknowledge, and what both a person struggling with insecurity and their well-meaning friends might miss, is that that insecurity may be in place for a...
Read MoreNew paper: Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization
Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization (free PDF). Foresight, forthcoming, DOI 10.1108/FS-04-2018-0037. Authors: Seth D. Baum, Stuart Armstrong, Timoteus Ekenstedt, Olle Häggström, Robin Hanson, Karin Kuhlemann, Matthijs M. Maas, James D. Miller, Markus Salmela, Anders Sandberg, Kaj Sotala, Phil Torres, Alexey Turchin, and Roman V. Yampolskiy. Abstract Purpose: This paper formalizes...
Read MoreFinland Museum Tour 1/??: Tampere Art Museum
I haven’t really been to museums as an adult; not because I’d have been particularly Anti-Museum, but just because museums never happened to become a Thing That I Do. I vaguely recall having been to a few museums with my parents when I was little, an occasional Japan exhibition as a teen when Japan was a Thing, and a few visits to various museums with school. I think my overall...
Read MoreIs the Star Trek Federation really incapable of building AI?
In the Star Trek universe, we are told that it’s really hard to make genuine artificial intelligence, and that Data is so special because he’s a rare example of someone having managed to create one. But this doesn’t seem to be the best hypothesis for explaining the evidence that we’ve actually seen. Consider: In the TOS episode “The Ultimate Computer“, the...
Read MoreSome conceptual highlights from “Disjunctive Scenarios of Catastrophic AI Risk”
My forthcoming paper, “Disjunctive Scenarios of Catastrophic AI Risk”, attempts to introduce a number of considerations to the analysis of potential risks from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As the paper is long and occasionally makes for somewhat dry reading, I thought that I would briefly highlight a few of the key points raised in the paper. The main idea here is that most of the...
Read MoreOn not getting swept away by mental content
There’s a specific subskill of meditation that I call “not getting swept away by the content”, that I think is generally valuable. It goes like this. You sit down to meditate and focus on your breath or whatever, and then a worrying thought comes to your mind. And it’s a real worry, something important. And you are tempted to start thinking about it and pondering it and...
Read MorePapers for 2017
I had three new papers either published or accepted into publication last year; all of them are now available online: How Feasible is the Rapid Development of Artificial Superintelligence? Physica Scripta 92 (11), 113001. Abstract: What kinds of fundamental limits are there in how capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems might become? Two questions in particular are of interest: 1) How...
Read MoreFixing science via a basic income
I ran across Ed Hagen’s article “Academic success is either a crapshoot or a scam”, which pointed out that all the methodological discussion about science’s replication crisis is kinda missing the point: yes, all of the methodological stuff like p-hacking is something that would be valuable to fix, but the real problem is in the incentives created by the crazy...
Read MoreBook review: The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self–Not Just Your “Good” Self–Drives Success and Fulfillment
The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self–Not Just Your “Good” Self–Drives Success and Fulfillment. By Todd Kashdan & Robert Biswas-Diener. Avery, 2014. This book was written by a pair of psychologists who thought that the excessive focus on good and positive feelings in positive psychology was a little overblown, and that the value of so-called...
Read MoreMeditation and mental space
One effect that I often notice after my meditation practice has been interrupted and I then manage to resume it again, is an increase in a kind of mental resilience. That is, when I have a lower resilience, feeling bad for any reason feels much more like an emergency. It’s something that forces itself into my consciousness, takes over, and refuses to go away. I would like to ignore it, but...
Read MoreAnti-tribalism and positive mental health as high-value cause areas
I think that tribalism is one of the biggest problems with humanity today, and that even small reductions of it could cause a massive boost to well-being. By tribalism, I basically mean the phenomenon where arguments and actions are primarily evaluated based on who makes them and which group they seem to support, not anything else. E.g. if a group thinks that X is bad, then it’s often seen...
Read MoreYou can never be universally inclusive
A discussion about the article “We Don’t Do That Here” (h/t siderea) raised the question about the tension between having inclusive social norms on the one hand, and restricting some behaviors on the other hand. At least, that was the way the discussion was initially framed. The thing is, inclusivity is a bit of a bad term, since you can never really be universally inclusive....
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This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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