The law says that: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure . One can distinguish four types of Goodhart problems…
Abstraction is lossy [ compression ]. A good abstraction throws away everything not relevant to a particular problem, while preserving a…
It's natural to fault someone who fails to follow advice, especially when the results are predictably bad. It can be helpful to notice and…
I used to play board games with ExBoyfriend and his friend Will. Will was literally getting a PhD in game studies, and almost always beat…
Most [ argument ] that people engage in isn't formally persuasive. It's a back and forth of giving reasons: I give a reason to do a thing…
see also [ communication is processing ] Developing an idea with someone else applies regularization to the idea. It guarantees that the…
In a work context: Consider a junior engineer and a senior engineer. The junior engineer says, 'I think doing X will be better than doing Y…
I got this concept from NameRedacted. People overestimate what they can do in a week, but underestimate what they can do in ten years. To do…
Talking and writing are not nearly as much about communication as we think. That's part of it, of course. But a significant portion, often…
Related: Learning increasingly complex ideas may amount to forming larger effective chunk sizes Expertise requires increasingly…
All else equal, constraints prevent you from doing what you'd have otherwise wanted to do, which is bad. But. Constraints prevent [ analysis…
Multiple people working together are fundamentally more powerful than a single person working alone. Governments recognize this fact, which…
Okay so there’s a lot of research on what conversations are, what the goals are (of course I don’t know most of this research…). It seems as…
Which is more useful: reading the New York Times every day, or reading John Stuart Mill? listening to a current-events podcast, vs listening…
[ Otter notes ] August 2020: When somebody says that X is good---here X could be love relationships, money, peace, or whatever---it is never…
Elephant and rider Asking "what should I value?" is asking the rider. it demands solving impossible moral questions. Asking "what do I value…
Events that seem really terrible---closing off good outcomes and potentially leading to bad outcomes---often refine into a fine path that…
I grew up in the 2000s reading the New Atheists, where 'faith' was considered a dirty word. Faith was the opposite of reason; it meant…
NameRedacted points out the strong free will theorem . This says that electrons sometimes have 'choices': situations where their behavior…
Why would you be 'proud' of something you had no control over? The core revelation for me was that pride is the opposite of shame . Most…
Opposite of a fixed or 'scarcity' mindset. It's important to recognize that the world is nonzero-sum and that improvements are possible. We…
these include things like: posing interesting questions for discussion useful [ generative questions ] like: what have you been reading…
I'm sometimes tempted to look back and find patterns in my life, and identify those as "who I really am". For example: maybe I want to be a…
To achieve final goals, we have to break them down into a hierarchy of instrumental goals, and then get to work on achieving those. And for…
A lot of discussion around [ artificial intelligence ] implicitly conflates intelligence with [ consciousness ]. It assumes that as we…
Interfaces enable modularity. In general, standardizing an interface can yield quadratic benefit at linear cost. Suppose we have people…
I don't want to be led. I want to be creative and do things that are dramatically new. Telling other people what to do feels almost evil to…
https://maskofreason.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf Insights illustrated by this story: Naming…
There's a tendency to focus on things that we have the (conceptual/mathematical/societal) tools to understand, even when we know this is…
I saw this phrase on Twitter somewhere and it really resonates as a description of the ideal approach to science. There is no real…
An idea I got from [ John Higgs ]'s discussion of metamodernism is that taking [ all models are wrong ] to its logical conclusion requires…
One last thought mental models are so, so important. When I think about computer modeling. It's actually great computers are powerful they…
Like democracy , meritocracy is the worst form of social organization, except for all the others that have been tried. Of course it is good…
(see David Graeber https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ ) Most work is oriented towards achieving [ instrumental goal ]s. But most…
This is one of the big problems with the world. Not the only one, and not the only way to look at it. But it's everywhere. status : a…
One way to model real-world [ causality ] is a bunch of forces working with and against each other. In this view, no individual force…
Something can be true but not 'true enough'. That is, you have a compelling causal theory for why X should increase Y. It might be that the…
As Josh Marshall said , at the beginning of the Trump presidency: "Optimism is not primarily a prediction but an ethic, a philosophy, a way…
A really valuable exercise that I should consider building into my routine is to regularly try to make and write down explicit predictions…
I have some discomfort with the political concept of 'privilege', e.g.: Being white is a privilege. Being male is a privilege. Being…
The idea of 'projection' in psychology means to assume that someone else has the same flaws, or foibles, or motivations as you do. It struck…
One model you could have of reading a book is that the book contains information, and once you've read it, you now possess that information…
Why do I want to write more? Because: writing forces thoughts to crystallize. It forces me to draw conclusions about what I believe and who…
When I was younger---in college or in grad school---I was sometimes conflicted about whether I should prioritize trying to get to correct…
SuccessfulFriend highlighted this distinction which I should really read more about. At a high level it's about the distinction between…
It's not a terrible summation of [ depression ] that it starts from seeing no way to achieve your goals. Sometimes that's because it's…
A lot of confused discussion around large organizations comes from conflating individual motivations with larger-scale 'structural…
Revolutionary ideas must live in the blind spots of the current intellectual conversation; otherwise people would already be using them…
This page (first brainstormed in an Otter note) is for issues where I feel pulled in several directions. Different principles seem to yield…
I used to think that there was a 'best' way to motivate an area. For example, in VI, the ELBO is derived from the KL divergence between a…
In order for a group of people, like an academic field, or a political elite, to meaningfully converse about a complex topic, they have to…
It's almost never worth worrying about whether an individual action is the right thing to do. It's like trying to dance while worrying at…
The Feynmannian/Sagan/Tyson "scientific" view is that the [ purpose ] of life is understanding : the world is a giant mystery, with layers…
tl;dr : the ideas we need to build intelligent systems may be different from those we need to understand them. Both are important, but…
For several reasons: multiple object-level causes a telescoping tower of causes at increasing levels of generality or abstraction 'because…
If two statements that both seem true conflict with each other, then it seems like you have a paradox. But the world itself is just as it is…
The [ agent ] model of intelligence imposes a sharp distinction between the agent and its environment, where the agent 'chooses' actions…
These days we think a lot about using data to train large [ language model ]s. But there's only so much data in the world; eventually we'll…
A pitfall with relying too heavily on rational deduction is that lots of logically 'true' conclusions are unimportant, or worse yet…
Language is an incredible bottleneck. There are infinitely many true facts about the world, even just in pure math, and yet we communicate…
From Jeff Bezos' 1997 shareholder letter : Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and…
Confidence is a positive [ feedback loop ]. You need a certain amount of confidence to try something hard. Success breeds more confidence…
like a 'useful perpective', but 'lens' implies focus or distortion whereas 'perspective' implies linear projection. Related to [ many models…
In the course of any person's life, you take in a vast amount of information. You have your own personal experiences, of course, and you…
Quote I like from Manuel Blum's advice to grad students , connecting writing to the power of [ Turing machine ]s: STUDYING: You are all…
What is the philosophy of the project? What principles is it betting on? Example from Ben's Ads doc: iterating on an end-to-end pipeline…
Sometimes it's daunting how much knowledge there is in the world. For any given area, there are a thousand specialties and subspecialties…