Hey peeps,
Here's your weekly dose of the Knowledge Bottle Newsletter.
You can think of this as a caffeine jolt ⚡ of not just inspiration but also some tactical advice you can use.
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Pascal's mugging
I sometimes find myself in a thought-experiment-type of a situation where I believe I am giving birth to a new concept, only to later discover its existence online. Are we all connected?
I am usually not defining it, but only constructing a mere example that makes sense to me.
I've recently discovered Pascal's mugging, which is a thought-experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization.
A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighted by their probability, have higher utility. But some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability diminishes. Hence the agent should focus more on vastly improbable cases with implausibly high rewards; this leads first to counter-intuitive choices, and then to incoherence, as the utility of every choice becomes unbounded.
My initial approach
I first thought of something slightly similar when I was pouring myself some water, and also spilling some during this process.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have potable tap water and have installed a clean faucet system in place, I believe that we have wasted quite a lot of liquid
in our lifetime.
Either by trying to clean up the glass or simply not paying attention during the pouring process, quite a lot of water is wasted. We are taking it for granted.
And then I thought about having a spectral doppelganger only I can see, a Shinigami for my internal world. This agent would come up every time I am about to make a mistake and will let me know that I need to pay closer attention to what I am doing.
I am only considering minor things for now, like again spilling some water or leaving the lights on. Installing a mental TAP can be a good solution so that I can change my defaults and optimize the heck out of trivial activities.
Enormous impact coming straight from the belly of the individual. Apply this recipe on a macro scale and = human progress.
This is why I have created this new page on the site called Mistakes.
I am aiming to track them down using some of the systems out there, and also providing some enhancements of my own.
The biological age of the heart
The biological age of the heart is consistently younger than chronological age.
I was skimming through this paper recently.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his memory checked by an expert.
…link
Long story short: install Anki
Before you buy
I usually spend some time doing some research before buying objects.
The Wirecutter is one place I often visit. Be aware, this one is owned by the New York Times.
More GPT-3
The closest a person off the street can easily come to experimenting with GPT-3 is using a website called AI Dungeon. The MITS Altair of text-generating AI, only a toy for now. But also the start of something that will change the world.
Rapid fire links 🔥
kvak.io is an online light-weight notepad. Visiting the homepage generates a new note with a unique URL that you can instantly share with anyone.
sidebar - Sidebar allows you to bookmark tweets, podcasts, products, websites, and news to create your own personal search engine. You can also do this with Notion Web Clipper btw.
Latest video
Gahahahahah
Universities should just offer autism grants where you get 30k a semester to study whatever weird obsessive hobby you have.
That’s it! 👋
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That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
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