A game of mattering Sep 23, 2022

When I have an overwhelming number of things to do, and insufficient native urge to do them, I often arrange them into a kind of game for myself. The nature and appeal of this game has been relatively stable for about a year, after many years of evolution, so this seems like a reasonable time to share it. I also play it when I just want to structure my day and am in the mood for it. I currently play something like two or three times a week.

The game

The basic idea is to lay out the tasks in time a bit like obstacles in a platformer or steps in Dance Dance Revolution, then race through the obstacle course grabbing them under consistently high-but-doable time pressure.

Here’s how to play:

1. Draw a grid with as many rows as there are remaining hours in your hoped for productive day, and ~3 columns. Each box stands for a particular ~20 minute period (I sometimes play with 15m or 30m periods.)
2. Lay out the gameboard: break the stuff you want to do into appropriate units, henceforth ‘items’. An item should fit comfortably in the length of a box, and it should be easy enough to verify completion. (This can be achieved through house rules such as ‘do x a tiny bit = do it until I have a sense that an appropriate tiny bit has been done’ as long as you are happy applying them). Space items out a decent amount so that the whole course is clearly feasible. Include everything you want to do in the day, including nice or relaxing things, or break activities. Drinks, snacks, tiny bouts of exercise, looking at news sites for 5 minutes, etc. Design the track thoughtfully, with hard bouts followed by relief before the next hard bout.
3. To play, start in the first box, then move through the boxes according to the time of day. The goal in playing is to collect as many items as you can, as you are forced along the track by the passage of time. You can collect an item by doing the task in or before you get to the box it is in. If it isn’t done by the end of the box, it gets left behind. However if you clear any box entirely, you get to move one item anywhere on the gameboard. So you can rescue something from the past, or rearrange the future to make it more feasible, or if everything is perfect, you can add an entirely new item somewhere.

Update updates Sep 22, 2022

You can now read or subscribe to this blog via world spirit sock stack, a Substack mirror of this site. I expect to see comments at wsss similarly often to wssp (with both being more often than at various other places this crossposts, e.g. LessWrong).

You can also be alerted to posts on Twitter via @wssockpuppet. I’m going to continue to Tweet about some subset of things on my personal account, so this runs a risk of double-seeing things.

Podcasts on surveys, slower AI, AI arguments Sep 18, 2022

I recently talked to Michael Trazzi for his podcast, The Inside View. It just came out, so if that’s a conversation you want to sit in on, do so here [ETA: or read it here].

The main topics were the survey of ML folk I recently ran, and my thoughts on moving more slowly on potentially world-threatening AI research (which is to say, AI research in general, according to the median surveyed ML researcher…). I also bet him a thousand dollars to his hundred that AI would not make blogging way more efficient in two years, if I recall. (I forget the exact terms, and there’s no way I’m listening to myself talk for that long to find out. If anyone else learns, I’m curious what I agreed to.)

For completeness of podcast reporting: I forgot to mention that I also talked to Daniel Filan on AXRP, like a year ago. In other old news, I am opposed to the vibe of time-sensitivity often implicit in the public conversation.

Survey advice Aug 24, 2022

Things I believe about making surveys, after making some surveys:

1. If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it. (Possibly this applies to things that aren’t survey questions also, but that’s a problem for another time.)
2. A better way to find out if your questions are clear is to repeatedly take a single individual person, and sit down with them, and ask them to take your survey while narrating the process: reading the questions aloud, telling you what they think the question is asking, explaining their thought process in answering it. If you do this repeatedly with different people until some are not confused at all, the questions are probably clear.
3. If you ask people very similar questions in different sounding ways, you can get very different answers (possibly related to the above, though that’s not obviously the main thing going on).

What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022? Aug 04, 2022

Crossposted from AI Impacts

AI Impacts just finished collecting data from a new survey of ML researchers, as similar to the 2016 one as practical, aside from a couple of new questions that seemed too interesting not to add.

Book review: The Passenger by Lisa Lutz Jun 23, 2022

Spoiler warning: spoilers for The Passenger by Lisa Lutz, and In the Cart, by Anton Chekhov.

I took up this book looking for a page-turner. It was, but hours before the end I thought its main contribution to my mental life would be the visceral knowledge that page-turners can be undelicious. It felt cold, and getting into its world felt bad. The protagonist slunk around dark and uncomfortable places, killing people, scheming harshly, perceiving low beams as dangers to the heads of tall men, and that sort of thing. With some amount of fretting about what she was becoming. I wanted to turn the pages, but I also kind of wanted it to end, and for me to read something more squarely enjoyable next time.

An inquiry into the thoughts of twenty-five people in India May 28, 2022

Sometimes I get excited about running surveys. Here is a Positly one from November 2020 in which I asked the following questions, to participants from India:

1. What are you looking forward to this week?
2. What do you think of as the most important thing going on in the world right now?
3. If you had a spare half hour right now, what would you do with it?
4. What is something you changed your mind about recently?
5. What in life is more important than other people realize?
6. If someone gave you $5 right now, what would you do with it?
7. Who is someone you think of as a hero?
8. Are you paying attention to the US election?
9. What was the biggest news story this year?

I don’t recall any notable constraints other than the location requirement, but I barely remember doing this.

Podcast: with Spencer Greenberg on groupstruckness and boundedness May 20, 2022

I talked to Spencer Greenberg a little while ago for his podcast Clearer Thinking. The recording is out today. According to his website we discussed:

What does it mean to be “groupstruck”? How does groupstruck-ness differ from the bystander effect, normalcy bias, and other related cognitive biases? How do we break people out of being groupstruck? What does it mean to be a “bounded” person? How can we build up better decision-making heuristics? What sorts of decisions do people usually not quantify but should (and vice versa)? How can we make rational relationship decisions without coming across as “calculating” or cold? How does anthropic reasoning affect our hypotheses about the nature of the universe and life within it (i.e., the Fermi paradox, the simulation hypothesis, etc.)?

You can listen or read the transcript here.

Proposal: Twitter dislike button May 17, 2022

The popular story of Twitter’s role in the ruin of civilization is that it is a runaway trash fire of reciprocal anger and offense, where otherwise nice people are possessed by overwhelming outrages, and drawn into throwing their own energy behind creating the vilest and most vindictive responses to what they see, turning away from reason and hurting others in turn, and so the place continues.

Fighting in various places for a really long time May 11, 2022

The first time someone raved to me about seeing Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought they were actually suggesting I see everything everywhere all at once, and I was briefly excited by the implication that this exhilarating possibility was somehow on the table.

After that disappointment I heard about it several times more, and warmed to the idea of seeing the movie anyway, especially on account of it being the most roundly recommended one I remember. The third time someone invited me to see it with them, I went.