(no subject)

lucretius knew there was a copper age before the iron age, and that humans were hunter-gathers before agriculture.

He got a lot of things wrong too (he thought the period of hunter gatherer tribes was preceded by a period of solitary humans iirc--nope!). Still it's way better than, for example, the narrative in genesis.

(no subject)

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Level Zero skill: When you make a mistake, rather than rehearsing the action you wish you'd taken, rehearse the plausible thought process that you wish had led up to that action. Like, if I fail to notice confusion, I imagine what it would have felt like at the time to notice the small note of discord, promote it to my attention, and reason about it using general heuristics that would have led to the right conclusion. Basically you want to visualize what it would have felt like, experientially, to be the nearest person to you who would have avoided that mistake using general thought processes and without any advance foreknowledge.

Ziz:

It's also important that you test whatever heuristics you come up with on other past experiences where the opposite choice was correct and you chose it. "Sure this heuristic would have saved me from trusting this untrustworthy person, but would it have also prevented me from trusting these other trustworthy people I did trust?"

This is what I love about programming computers compared to trainin myself. Computers make "rerun on all previously considered cases" easy, but for my own life it's difficult and timeconsuming

(no subject)

ok my idea is: no more optimization in R. However, keep doing linear regression and random forest in R. Like the really simple baseline models. But actually optimizing parameters of a model, do that in PyTorch or something.

Learning the boundaries of how much I can get away with doing in R is important. Like doing something in R that gets too complex is how I've made myself miserable many times in the past.

(no subject)

ok i was excited that the currently posting It's Walky! storyline had ultra car because I've read all the other publicly available Ultra Car content

it turns out all she does is sit in the parking lot during the climactic fight scene:

They'll probably let me know if they need me.

which is perfect actually. Ultra Car is unhelpful. That's why it's so special when she is helpful, it shows she cares!

(likee, with someone else you cuold wonder whether they care or if they're just doing it cause they feel like they're supposed to, but with ltra Car you can rule out that second possibility)