https://t.co/1WwTB9B21Z

A correct insight saves 6 months of work, so comport yourself in such a way that you have correct insights. That is probably not non stop work.

New paper! We show how to give an LLM the ability to accurately verbalize what changed about itself after a weight update is applied. We see this as a proof of concept for a new, more scalable approach to interpretability.🧵

one underrated technique for visualization - getting comfortable with the logarithmic scale (just add the numbers in exponents of 10!!) -> to associate stepping up / down scales in an infinitely vast world (powers of 10 style) with quantitative scales (10^10 atoms = 10 steps)

@tenobrus istg parents do not remember what it is like to be a child. I figured this when I was a child and did my damndest to remember as I aged, still knowing that I would forget many key things, but at least I will (and do!) recall a bit and know the rough shape and size of what I lost

Have you ever wanted to learn how to draw? Have you ever heard of 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'? (Below: results after 5 days)

probably we can do much much better for both by optimizing over the entire abstraction hierarchy rather than leaving it to either purely low or high level stuff.

for legal reasons this is like at least half a joke, but meaning-maxxers are hedonists focusing on abstraction. poets are incorrigible gooners, mathematicians as well.

meaning? you mean valence cascading up the abstraction hierarchy?

it turns out the best teachers allow us to learn wayyyy faster than what seems possible not just 10% or 50% faster, but like 10-1000x faster this screenshot is self portraits before/after 5 days it turns out we can also learn “bliss on demand” in a week (@jhanatech)

Nice thread about anaesthesia & consciousness. Might be right! But the main counterargument isn't mentioned... Just because general anaesthetics switch off consciousness reversibly doesn't mean "anaesthetic mechanisms = consciousness mechanisms" Various other mechanisms can do

The klein quartic is a piece of godshatter

new post today – a first collaboration with @KanizsaBoundary! in which we explain his way of thinking about the buddhist framework of the three marks.

I think it would be reasonable (if not for social costs) for many jobs to require you exercise for a half hour or smth every day. The cognitive gains are worth it.

One trait I’m excited to see researched more is handedness. Low heritability with very few known environmental influences. Consensus among scholars seems to be that developmental noise is the main source of variance, but I’m skeptical.

It's so funny that poison/toxin/venom is just shapes. You imagine them as like acid or heat or something, a physically destructive thing in some fundamental way but no. They are just the wrong shape and fit into places they shouldn't because of the shapes you have

if you want to be very happy it’s more effective to ask “who are the happiest humans and how did they get there” rather than “what things do I want”

Anyway it seems quite likely now to me that accounts of a last-minute conversion are probably deriving from here and other sources, and that they are probably not presenting things fairly, and they are probably not correct either.

Here, it is not mentioned that they previously were catholic out of convenience, and it is framed as if Johnny had not been saying the same things about Pascal's wager since the beginning. It is also not mentioned that "There are those..." refers to his brother, who was there.

“In this period Johnny returned to the Catholic faith that had also been significant to his mother after the family’s conversion in 1929-30. There are those who say he took instruction from the Catholic priest at the hospital mainly because the priest was an educated man, to whom