Learning to recognize judgmental labels
In the spirit of Non-Violent Communication, I’ve today tried to pay more attention to my thoughts and notice any judgments or labels that I apply to other people that are actually disguised indications of my own needs. The first one that I noticed was this: within a few weeks I’ll be a visiting instructor at a science camp, teaching things to a bunch of teens and preteens. I was...
Read MoreLess Wrong posts
Less Wrong is “a community blog devoted to the art of human rationality”. In practice, there are all kinds of fascinating discussions on the site, on topics ranging from psychology to game theory and from futurism to self-improvement. I regularly post and comment on the site. Of the pieces that I’ve written, here are some of my favorites: Thoughts on moral intuitions. Attempts...
Read MoreMaverick Nannies and Danger Theses
I explain why I think that some of the thought experiments that have previously been used to illustrate the dangers of AI are flawed and should be used very cautiously, why I'm less worried about the dangers of AI than I used to be, and what are some of the remaining reasons for why I do continue to be somewhat worried. ~3500 words.
Read MoreMeditation insights: suffering is intrinsically bound together with pleasure
A principle which I’ve been gradually been able to observe and internalize, thanks both to meditation and some other mind-hacking practices, is that suffering is never about the pain itself. There are conditions in which people report pain but do not mind it; pain is just an attention signal. Pain does not intrinsically cause suffering: what causes suffering is experiencing the pain, and...
Read MoreMy idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion
Here’s a conception that I have about sacredness, divinity, and religion. There’s a sense in which love and friendship didn’t have to exist. If you look at the animal kingdom, you see all kinds of solitary species, animals that only come together for mating. Members of social species – such as humans – have companionship and cooperation, but many species do quite...
Read MoreMy knowledge as anti-knowledge
During my more pessimistic moments, I grow increasingly skeptical about our ability to know anything. Science, governmental institutions, the media, the Internet... all of these mostly fail.
Read MoreOpen loops in fiction
A fiction-writing trick I find particularly compelling are open loops. A cliffhanger is an example: you want to know how the hero survives, so your thoughts keep looping back to the situation, trying to figure out what happens next. But you need the author to tell you. Really good writing uses open loops at the sentence level as well. The first sentence of the story is meaningful on its own, but...
Read MorePolitical logic 101
Sometimes, seeing somebody you disagree with make both silly and insightful claims can help reduce your own biases.
Read MoreReality is broken, or, an XCOM2 review
Yesterday evening I went to the grocery store, and was startled to realize that I was suddenly in a totally different world. Computer games have difficulty grabbing me these days. Many of the genres I used to enjoy as a kid have lost their appeal: point-and-click -style adventure requires patience and careful thought, but I already deal with plenty of things that require patience and careful...
Read MoreRelationship compatibility as patterns of emotional associations
Much of relationship compatibility comes down to a fuzzy concept that’s variously referred to as “chemistry”, “clicking”, or just feeling good and comfortable in the other’s presence. This is infamously difficult to predict by any other means than actually spending time around the other. OKCupid-style dating sites, with their extensive batteries of questions...
Read MoreSimplifying the environment: a new convergent instrumental goal
Convergent instrumental goals (also basic AI drives) are goals that are useful for pursuing almost any other goal, and are thus likely to be pursued by any agent that is intelligent enough to understand why they’re useful. They are interesting because they may allow us to roughly predict the behavior of even AI systems that are much more intelligent than we are. Instrumental goals are...
Read MoreSocial media saps more than just short-term attention
The prevalent wisdom about why social media is distracting is that it provides a constant opportunity for immediate distraction. There's a lot of truth to that, but in addition to sapping our short-term attention, it also affects long-term attention.
Read MoreSoftware for Moral Enhancement
An algorithm will never slip up in a weak moment. What if we could identify when we are likely to make mistakes, figure out what we’d want to do instead, and then outsource our decisions to a reliable algorithm? In what ways could we use software to make ourselves into better people?
Read MoreTeaching Bayesian networks by means of social scheming, or, why edugames don’t have to suck
As a part of my Master’s thesis in Computer Science, I am designing a game which seeks to teach its players a subfield of math known as Bayesian networks, hopefully in a fun and enjoyable way. This post explains some of the basic design and educational philosophy behind the game, and will hopefully also convince you that educational games don’t have to suck. I will start by discussing a...
Read MoreTeaching economics & ethics with Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker
Unusual ways to teach economics. I’m currently playing Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker, a silly but fun little game in which you run a dating agency and try to get your clients on successful dates and, eventually, into a successful relationship. Now one way of playing this would be to just prioritize the benefit of each client, trying to get them in maximally satisfying relationships as fast...
Read MoreTechnology will destroy human nature
Human values, and human nature, are grounded in various constraints that keep us stuck in a relatively narrow space of possibilities. Once those constraints are relaxed, it seems likely that humanity will cease to exist.
Read MoreThings are allowed to be good and bad at the same time
I’ve found it useful to sometimes remind myself that things are allowed to be good and bad at the same time. Suppose that there was a particular job that I wanted but didn’t get. Afterwards, I find myself thinking: “Damnit, some of the stuff in that job would have been so cool.” “But the commute would have killed me, it wouldn’t have been a good fit for me...
Read MoreThoughts on moral intuitions
Our moral reasoning is ultimately grounded in our moral intuitions: instinctive “black box” judgements of what is right and wrong. For example, most people would think that needlessly hurting somebody else is wrong, just because. The claim doesn’t need further elaboration, and in fact the reasons for it can’t be explained, though people can and do construct elaborate...
Read MoreTowards meaningfully gamifying Bayesian Networks, or, just what can you do with them
In my previous article, I argued that educational games could be good if they implemented their educational content in a meaningful way. This means making the player actually use the educational material to predict the possible consequences of different choices within the game, in such a manner that the choices will have both short- and long-term consequences. More specifically, I talked about my...
Read MoreTrying to translate when people talk past each other
Sometimes two people are talking past each other, and I try to help them understand each other (with varying degrees of success). It’s as if they are looking at the same object, but from different angles. Mostly they see the same thing – most of the words have shared meanings. But some key words and assumptions have a different meaning to them. Often, I find that one person (call them...
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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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