Which Things Are Worth Memorizing?

July 24, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags:
Epistemic status: one or two hours' worth of thought, reasoning feels pretty clean from the inside. I think I'd be willing to bet on this producing a small effect, but nothing too important. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons to memorize things - fast access and idea generation. Information stored in your brain is accessible very quickly, about 10x or 100x faster than retrieval from the…

Quick Reminder That Your Ability to Do Good Is Ridiculous

April 17, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags:
Epistemic status: definitely old hat, certainly not my original thoughts, but you know it's worth reiterating every now and then. The Effective Altruism movement in general tends to have problems with feelings of powerlessness. People feel that even if they are on a high-impact track, they still won't be able to make a dent in the global scale of problems. Even worse, people feel that if they aren't a genius…

DIY Asymmetric Weapons With Symmetric Weapons And Bayescraft

April 9, 2021Posted inFavoritesTags:
Epistemic status: Follow-up to this post. Fairly well considered, few hours total epistemic effort. Substantially more confident than before that this is correct, but still feel very ick about it. An asymmetric weapon is any strategy that has a higher probability of winning p(Win) if it is aligned with one side its axis of asymmetry than with the other. In other words, p(Win | X) > p(Win | ~X). This…

The “Ratchets vs Springs” Heuristic

April 3, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags:
Epistemic status: this feels like it's been helpful for me to allocate my time better, but I have very scarce concrete support for that. Reasoning feels clean from the inside though. A lot of the problems I face day-to-day can be boiled down to figuring out how to spend some finite pool of resources to maximize some function. When deciding what course I want to take on this kind of…

I Have Changed My Mind About Asymmetric Weapons

March 21, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags: 1 Comment
Epistemic status: one step of reasoning away from this LessWrong post. Very nervous about correctness of final conclusion, but can't pin down very well if that's actual uncertainty or just not liking where it leads. Asymmetric and symmetric weapons are a notion popularized by Scott Alexander, via these two Slate Star Codex posts. To briefly summarize, an asymmetric weapon is a strategy that's more effective for pursuing some goals than…

We Should Be Testing Frameworks

March 20, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags:
Epistemic status: based mainly on Tetlock's research and thinking of knowledge as predictive power. Really only one major inferential step - "if it works it works, and now we can actually tell if it does!" Overview I hear the word "framework" tossed around a lot in academia and adjacent circles. Until very recently, I thought the word was at best just a bit of decorative academ-ese, an excuse to use…

Math, Science, and Logic Are Predictive Models

March 18, 2021Posted inUncategorizedTags: 1 Comment
Epistemic status: content summarized and synthesized (0-1 steps of reasoning) from the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Unreasonable Effectiveness I’ve heard several people – professors, peers, and folks on the internet – express surprise at the "unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in describing the physical universe. In other words, they claim to be surprised that mathematical laws are able to describe the workings of the universe so precisely. From a certain point…

Discuss the Substance, Not the Symbol

March 13, 2021Posted inFavoritesTags:
Epistemic status: content summarized and synthesized (0-1 steps of reasoning) from the Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky, specifically A Human's Guide to Words. Guiding Puzzle: Is X a Y? Questions of the form "is X a Y" are all over the place, and a huge amount of cognitive power goes into trying to answer them. Some of them are fun or trivial, like "is water wet" or "is cereal a soup".…